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INSIDE THE RUSSIAN 
REVOLUTION 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & C0. ? Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 



THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



Catherine Breshkovskaia, the "Little Grandmother of the Russian 
Revolution. " 



INSIDE THE RUSSIAN 
REVOLUTION 



BY 

RHETA CHILDE DORR 



ILLUSTRATED 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



1917 

All rights reserved 



Copyright, 1917, 
By THE EVENING MAIL 
Copyright, 1917, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and Elcctrotyped. Published November, 1917 



NOV 30 1917 






TABLE OF CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I Topsy-Turvy Land i 

II "All the Power to the Soviet" ... 10 

III The July Revolution 19 

IV An Hour of Hope 30 

V The Committee Mania 41 

VI The Woman with the Gun .... 50 

VII To the Front with Botchkareva . . 58 

VIII Camp and Battlefield 65 

IX Amazons in Training 75 

X The Homing Exiles — Two Kinds . . 84 

XI How Rasputin Died 97 

XII Anna Virubova Speaks 107 

XIII More Leaves in the Current . . . 119 

XIV The Passing of the Romanoffs . . . 129 
XV The House of Mary and Martha . . 141 

XVI The Tavarishi Face Famine .... 152 

XVII General January, the Conqueror . . 162 

XVIII When the Workers Own Their Tools . 172 

XIX Why Cotton Cloth Is Scarce . . . 181 

XX Mrs. Pankhurst in Russia . . . . 189 

XXI Kerensky, the Mystery Man . . . 199 

XXII The Rights of Small Nations . . . 208 

XXIII Will the Germans Take Petrogkad? . 217 

XXIV Russia's Greatest Needs 226 

XXV What Next? 235 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Catherine Breshkovskaia, the "Little Grandmother 
of the Russian Revolution." Frontispiece 

FACING 

Typical crowd on the Nevski Prospect during the PAGE 
Bolshevik or Maximalist risings 22 

Kerensky watching the funeral of victims of the July 

Bolshevik risings 42 / 

Mareea Botchkareva, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst and 

Women of "The Battalion of Death." .... 52/ 

Prince Felix YussupofF, at whose palace on the 
Moika Canal Rasputin was killed, and his wife, 
the Grand Duchess Irene Alexandrovna, niece of 
the late Czar 92 

Gregory Rasputin and some of his female devotees . 108 

Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky 142 

The Grand Duchess Elizabeta Feodorovna, sister of 
the late Czarina, and widow of the Grand Duke 
Serge, who was assassinated during the Revolution 
of 1905, now Abbess of the House of Mary and 
Martha at Moscow 150 



INSIDE THE RUSSIAN 
REVOLUTION 



CHAPTER I 

TOPSY-TURVY LAND 

Early in May, 19 17, I went to Russia, eager to 
see again, in the hour of her deliverance, a country 
in whose struggle for freedom I had, for a dozen 
years, been deeply interested. I went to Russia a so- 
cialist by conviction, an ardent sympathizer with rev- 
olution, having known personally some of the brave 
men and women who suffered imprisonment and ex* 
ile after the failure of the uprising in 1905-6. I re- 
turned from Russia with the very clear conviction 
that the world will have to wait awhile before it 
can establish any cooperative millenniums, or before 
it can safely hand over the work of government to 
the man in the street. 

All my life I have been an admiring student of the 
French revolution, and I have fervently wished that 
I might have lived in the Paris of that time, to wit- 
ness, even as a humble spectator, the downfall of 
autocracy and the birth of a people's liberty. Well 
— I lived for three months in the capital of revolu- 

i 



2 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



tionary Russia. I saw a revolution which pre- 
sents close parallels with the French revolution both 
in men and events. I saw the downfall of au- 
tocracy and the birth of liberty much greater than 
the French ever aspired to. I saw the fondest 
dream of the socialists suddenly come true, and the 
dream turned out to be a nightmare such as I pray 
that this or any country may forever be spared. 

I saw a people delivered from one class tyranny 
deliberately hasten to establish another, quite as 
brutal and as unmindful of the common good as the 
old one. I saw these people, led out of groaning 
bondage, use their first liberty to oust the wise and 
courageous statesmen who had delivered them. I 
saw a working class which had been oppressed under 
czardom itself turn oppressor; an army that had 
been starved and betrayed use its freedom to starve 
and betray its own people. I saw elected delegates to 
the people's councils turn into sneak thieves and 
looters. I saw law and order and decency and all 
regard for human life or human rights set aside, 
and I saw responsible statesmen in power allow all 
this to go on, allow their country to rush toward an 
abyss of ruin and shame because they were afraid 
to lose popularity with the mob. 

The government was so afraid of losing the 
support of the mob that it permitted the 
country to be overrun by German agents pos- 
ing as socialists. These agents spent fortunes 
in the separate peace propaganda alone. They 
demoralized the army, corrupted the workers in field 
and factories, and put machine guns in the hands of 
fanatical dreamers, sending them out into the streets 



TOPSY-TURVY LAND 



3 



to murder their own friends and neighbors. Every 
one knew who these men were, but the mob liked 
their "line of talk" and the government was afraid 
to touch them. After one of the last occasions when, 
at their behest, the Bolsheviki went out and shot up 
Petrograd, Lenine, the arch leader, and some of his 
principal gangsters deemed it the part of discretion 
to retire from Russia temporarily, and they got to 
Sweden without the slightest difficulty, no attempt 
having been made to stop them. Some of the minor 
employees of the Kaiser were arrested, among them 
a woman in whose name the bank account appeared 
to be. But she too, and probably all the others, 
were later released. 

A government like this could not bring peace and 
order into a distracted nation. It could not estab- 
lish a democracy. It could not govern. The sooner 
the allied countries realize this the better it will be 
for Russia and for the world that wants peace. It 
is not because I am unfriendly to Russia that I write 
thus. It is because I am friendly, because I have 
faith in the future of the Russian people, because I 
believe that their experiment in popular government, 
if it succeeds, will be as inspiring to the rest of the 
world as our own was in the eighteenth century. I 
think the most unkind thing any friend of Russia can 
do is to minimize or conceal the facts about the ter- 
rible upheaval going on there at the present time. 
Russia looks to the American people for help in her 
troubled hour, and if the American people are to 
help they will have to understand the situation. No 
discouragement to the allies, no assistance to the 
common enemy need result from a plain statement 



4 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



of the facts. The enemy knows all the facts al- 
ready. 

Everything I saw in Russia, in the cities and near 
the front, convinced me that what is going on there 
vitally concerns us. Every man, woman and child 
in the United States must get to work to give the 
help so sorely needed by the allies. Whatever has 
failed in Russia, whatever has broken down must 
never be missed. We must supply these deficiencies. 
Our business now is to understand, and to hurry, 
hurry, hurry with our task of getting trained and 
seasoned men into France. After what I saw in the 
neighborhood of Vilna, Dvinsk and Jacobstadt, I 
know what haste on this side means to the world. 
There are several reasons why the whole truth has 
not before been written about the Russian revolu- 
tion. It could not be written or cabled from Rus- 
sia. It could not be carried out in the form of notes 
or photographs. It could not even be discovered by 
the average person who goes to Russia, because the 
average visitor lives at the expensive Hotel d'Eu- 
rope, never goes out except in a droshky, and meets 
only Russians of social position to whom he has 
letters of introduction, and who naturally try to give 
him the impression that the troubled state of affairs 
is merely temporary. The visitor usually knows no 
Russian and cannot read the newspapers. There 
are two good French newspapers published in Pet- 
rograd, but the average American traveler is as 
ignorant of French as of Russian. Even if he could 
read all the daily papers, however, he would not get 
very much information. The press censorship is as 
rigid and as tyrannical to-day as in the heyday of 



TOPSY-TURVY LAND 



5 



the autocracy, only a different kind of news is sup- 
pressed. One of the modest demands put forth by 
the Tavarishi (comrades) when I was in Petrograd 
was for a requisition of all the white print paper in 
the market, the paper to be distributed equally 
among all newspapers, large and small. The ob- 
ject, candidly stated, was to diminish the size and the 
circulation of the "bourgeois" papers. 

A great deal of news, as we regard news, never 
gets into the papers at all, or is compressed into 
very small space. For example there have been a 
number of terrible railroad accidents on the Rus- 
sian roads. Most of these one never heard of un- 
less some one he knew happened to be killed or 
injured. Sometimes a bare announcement of a great 
fatality was permitted. Thus an express train be- 
tween Moscow and Petrograd was wrecked, forty 
persons being killed and more than seventy injured. 
This wreck got a whole paragraph in the news- 
papers, with no list of the dead and injured and no 
explanation of the cause. The fact is that the rail- 
roads are in a condition of complete demoralization 
and the only wonder is that more wrecks do not 
occur. 

An acquaintance of mine in Moscow, the wife of 
a colonel in the British army, was anxious to go to 
Petrograd to meet her husband who was expected 
there on his way from the front. My friend's 
father, who is the managing head of a large Mos- 
cow business concern, tried to prevail on her to wait 
for her husband to reach her there, but she was 
anxious to see him at the earliest moment and in- 
sisted on her tickets being purchased. The day after 



6 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



she was to have gone her father called on me and 
told me of his intense relief at receiving, an hour 
before train time, a telegram from the colonel say- 
ing that he would be in Moscow the next morning. 

"And what do you think happened to that train 
my daughter was to have taken?" he asked. It was 
the regular night express to Petrograd, correspond- 
ing somewhat to the Congressional Limited between 
New York and Washington. A few miles out of 
Moscow a difference arose between the engineer and 
the stoker, and in order to settle it they stopped the 
train and had a fight. One of the men hit the other 
on the head with a monkey wrench, injuring him 
pretty badly. Authority of some kind stepped in 
and arrested the assailant. The engineer's cab was 
blood-stained, and some authority unhitched the 
engine and sent it back to Moscow as evidence. The 
train all this time, with its hundreds of passengers, 
stood on the tracks waiting for a new engine and 
crew, and if it was not run into and wrecked it was 
because it was lucky. 

About the middle of August an American corre- 
spondent traveled on that same express train from 
Petrograd to Moscow. The night was warm, and 
as the Russian occupants of his carriage had the 
usual constitutional objection to raised windows, he 
insisted on leaving the door of the compartment 
open. In the middle of the night a band of soldiers 
boarded the train and went into every one of the un- 
locked compartments, five in all, neatly and silently 
looting them of all bags and suitcases. The Ameri- 
can correspondent lost everything he possessed — 
extra clothes, money, passport, papers. There was 



TOPSY-TURVY LAND 



7 



a Russian staff officer in that compartment and he 
lost even the clothes he traveled in, and was obliged 
to descend in his pajamas. The conductor of the 
train admitted that he saw the robbery committed, 
that he raised no hand to prevent it, nor even pressed 
the signal which would have stopped the train. 
"They would have killed me," he pleaded in exten- 
uation. "Besides, it happens almost every night on 
a small or large scale." 

There is only one way of getting at the facts of 
the Russian situation, and that is by living as the 
Russians do, associating with Russians, hearing 
their stories day by day of the tragedy of what has 
been called the bloodless revolution. This I did, as 
nearly as it was possible, from the end of May until 
the 30th of August, in Petrograd, Moscow and be- 
hind one of the fighting fronts. In Petrograd I 
lived in the Hotel Militaire, formerly the Astoria, 
the headquarters of Russian officers and of the nu- 
merous English, French and Roumanian officers on 
missions in Russia. This was the hotel where the 
bitterest fighting took place during the revolution- 
ary days of February, 19 17. The outside of the 
building is literally riddled with bullets, every win- 
dow had to be replaced, and the work of renovat- 
ing the interior was still going on when I left. Un- 
der the window in my bedroom was a pool of dried 
blood as big as a saucer, and the carpet was stained 
with drops leading from the window to the station- 
ary washbowl in the alcove dressing room. Over 
the bed were two bullet holes. 

Since the revolution the Hotel Militaire has 
been a garrison, soldiers sleeping in several rooms 



8 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



on the ground floor and two sentinels standing 
day and night at the door and at the gateway lead- 
ing into the service court. I do not know 
why, when I asked for a room, the manager 
gave it to me. Two other women writers had 
rooms there, but one was in a party which in- 
cluded American officers, and the other was intro- 
duced by an English officer attached to the British 
embassy. However, I took the room and was grate- 
ful, because whatever happened in Petrograd was 
quickly known in the hotel. Also, it faced the square 
on which was located the Marie Palace, where the 
provisional government held many of its meetings, 
and where several important congresses were held. 
Whenever the Bolsheviki broke loose this square 
always saw some fighting. It was an excellent place 
for a correspondent to live. 

I spent much of my time in the streets, listening, 
with the aid of an interpreter, a young university 
girl, to the speeches which were continually being 
made up and down the Nevski Prospect, the Litainy 
and other principal streets. I talked, through my in- 
terpreter, with people who sat beside me on park 
benches, in trams, railroad trains and other public 
places. I met all the Russians I could, people of 
every walk of life, of every political faith. I spent 
days in factories. I talked with workers and with 
employers. I even met and talked with adherents 
of the old regime. I talked for nearly an hour with 
the last Romanoff left in freedom, the Grand Duch- 
ess Serge, sister of the former empress, widow of 
the emperor's uncle. I went, late at night, to a pal- 
ace on the Grand Morskaia where in strictest retire- 



TOPSY-TURVY LAND 



9 



ment lives the woman who has been charged with 
being the closest friend and ally of Rasputin, the 
one who, at his orders, is alleged to have adminis- 
tered poison to the young Czarevitch. I traveled 
in a troop train two days and nights with a regiment 
of fighting women — the Botchkareva "Battalion of 
Death" — and I lived with them in their barrack be- 
hind the fighting lines for nine days. I stayed with 
them until they went into action, I saw them 
afterward in the hospitals and heard their own sto- 
ries of the battle into which they led thousands of re- 
luctant men. I talked with many soldiers and offi- 
cers. 

Russia is sick. She is gorged on something she 
has never known before — freedom: she is sick al- 
most to die with excesses, and the leadership which 
would bring the panacea is violently thrown aside 
because suspicion of any authority has bred the 
worst kind of license. Russia is insane; she is not 
even morally responsible for what she is doing. Will 
she recover? Yes. But, God! what pain must she 
bear before she gets real freedom! 



CHAPTER II 



"all the power to the soviet" 

About the first thing I saw on the morning of 
my arrival in Petrograd last spring was a group of 
young men, about twenty in number, I should think, 
marching through the street in front of my hotel, 
carrying a scarlet banner with an inscription in large 
white letters. 

"What does that banner say?" I asked the hotel 
commissionaire who stood beside me. 

"It says 'AH the Power to the Soviet,' " was the 
answer. 

"What is the soviet?" I asked, and he replied 
briefly: 

"It is the only government we have in Russia 
now." 

And he was right. The Soviets, or councils of sol- 
diers' and workmen's delegates, which have spread 
like wildfire throughout the country, are the nearest 
thing to a government that Russia has known since 
the very early days of the revolution. 

The most striking parallel between the French 
and the Russian revolutions lies in the facility with 
which both were snatched away from the sane and 
intelligent men who began them and placed in the 
hands of fanatics, who turned them into mad orgies 
of blood and terror. The first French revolution- 
ists rebelled against the theory of the divine right of 

10 



"ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET" u 



kings to govern or misgovern the people. They 
wanted a constitution and a government by consent 
of the governed. But the mob came in and took 
possession of the situation, and the result was the 
guillotine and the reign of terror. Miliukoff, Rod- 
zianko, Lvoff, and their associates in the Russian 
Duma, rebelled against a stupid, cruel autocrat who 
was doing his best to lose the war and to bring the 
country to ruin and dishonor. They wanted a con- 
stitution for Russia, and, for the time being at least, 
a figurehead king who would leave government in 
the hands of responsible ministers. But the Pet- 
rograd council of soldiers' and workmen's delegates 
came in and took possession of the situation, and the 
result is a country torn with anarchy, brought to the 
verge of bankruptcy, and ready, unless something 
happens between now and next spring, to fall into 
the hands of the Germans. 

These councils of workmen are not new. In the 
upheaval of 1905-06 a man named Khrustaliov, a 
labor leader, became the head of an organization 
called the Petrograd Council of Workmen's Depu- 
ties. It was made up of elected delegates from all 
the principal factories in and near the capital, and 
during the general strike which forced Nicholas to 
convene the first Duma, the council assumed general 
control of the whole labor situation, managing mat- 
ters with rare good sense and firmness. Witte, who 
became premier in those days, negotiated with Khru- 
staliov as with an equal. For a time he and his 
council were a real power in the empire. A dozen 
cities formed similar organizations. There were 
councils of workmen's deputies, peasants' deputies, 



12 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



even, in some places, of soldiers' deputies. The re- 
action which came in July, 1906, swept them all into 
oblivion, and I never found anybody who knew what 
became of Khrustaliov. But the tradition of the 
council of workmen's deputies was unforgotten. 
Perhaps the council even existed still in secret; I do 
not know. It was quickly revived in March, 19 17, 
and before the political revolution was fairly ac- 
complished it had added soldiers to its title and had 
curtly informed the provisional government and the 
Duma that no laws could be made or enforced with- 
out first having received the approval of the work- 
ing people's representatives. No policy in peace or 
war could be announced or put into practice; no or- 
ders could be given the army; no treaties concluded 
with the allies; in short, nothing could be done with- 
out first consulting the 1,500 men and women — 
five women — who made up the Council of Work- 
men's and Soldiers' Delegates. 

If the country had been in a condition of peace in- 
stead of war this would not have been at all a bad 
thing. The working people of Russia, under the 
electoral system devised by the old regime, had very 
little representation in the Duma, and they had a 
perfect right to demand a voice in the organiza- 
tion of the new government. But unfortunately the 
country was at war; and more unfortunately still, 
the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates 
was made up in large part of extreme radicals to 
whom the war was a matter of entire indifference. 
The revolution to them meant an opportunity to 
put into practice new economic theories, the social- 
istic state. They conceived the vast dream of estab- 



"ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET 



lishing a new order of society, not only for Russia 
but for the whole world. They were going to dic- 
tate terms of peace, and call on the working people 
of every country to join them in enforcing that peace. 
After that they were going to do away with all capi- 
talists, bankers, investors, property owners. Ar- 
mies and navies were to be scrapped. I don't know 
what they purposed doing with the constitution of 
the United States, but "capitalistic" America was to 
be made over with the rest of the world. 

Many members of this council are well-meaning 
theorists, dreamers, exactly like thousands in this 
country who read no books or newspapers except 
those written by their own kind, who "express them- 
selves" by wearing red ties and long hair, and who 
exist in a cloudy world of their own. These people 
are honest and they are capable of being reasoned 
with. In Russia they are known as Minsheviki, 
meaning small claims. A noisy and troublesome and 
growing minority in the council are called Bolshe- 
viki (big claims), because they demand everything 
and will not even consider compromise. They want 
a separate peace, entirely favorable to Germany. 
I talked to a number of these men, but I could never 
get one of them to explain the reason of this friend- 
ship for Germany. Vaguely they seemed to feel that 
socialism was a German doctrine and, therefore, as 
soon as Russia put it into practice, the Germans 
would follow suit. Not all the council members are 
working people. Some have never done a hand's 
turn of manual work in their lives. Many of the 
soldier members have never seen service and never 
will. The Jewish membership is very large, and in 



i 4 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



Russia the Jews have never been allowed any prac- 
tice of citizenship. 

Lastly the council is liberally sprinkled with Ger- 
man spies and agents. Every once in a while one of 
these men is unmasked and put out. But it is more 
than likely that his place is quickly filled. It is a 
most difficult thing to convince the council that any 
"Tavarish," which is the Russian word for comrade, 
can be guilty of double dealing. The council de- 
fended Lenine up to the last moment. Even after 
he fled the country the Socialist newspapers, Isves- 
tia, Pravda, and Maxim Gorki's Nova Jisn, 
declared him to be the victim of an odious calumny. 
It was this Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Del- 
egates that first claimed a consultive position in the 
government, and within a few months was parading 
the streets with banners demanding "All the Power 
to the Soviet." 

I cannot say that I unreservedly blame them. 
They were people who had never known any kind 
of freedom, they had been poor and oppressed and 
afraid of their lives. All of a sudden they were 
freed. And when they went in numbers to the Du- 
ma and claimed a right to a voice in their own fu- 
ture, men like Kerensky and others, who are honest 
dreamers, others plain demagogues and office seek- 
ers, came out and lauded them to the skies, told 
them that the world was theirs, that they alone had 
brought about the revolution and therefore had a 
right to take possession of the country. The effect 
of this on soldiers and on the working people was 
immediate and disastrous. 

If Kerensky was not the author of the famous 



"ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET" 15 



Order No. 1, which was the cause of most of the 
riot and bloodshed in the army, he at least signed it 
and defended it. This order provided for regimen- 
tal government by committees, the election of offi- 
cers by the soldiers, the doing away with all salut- 
ing of superiors by enlisted men and the abolition of 
the title "your nobility," which was the form of ad- 
dress used to officers. In place of this form the sol- 
diers were henceforth to address their officers as 
Gospodeen (meaning mister), captain, colonel, gen- 
eral, as the case might be. Order No. 1 was a plain 
license to disband the Russian army. Abolishing 
the custom of saluting may seem a small thing. A 
member of the Root mission expressed himself thus 
to me soon after his arrival in Petrograd: "This 
talk of anarchy is all nonsense, " he said. "A lot of 
peacock officers are sore because the men don't sa- 
lute them any more. Why should the men salute?" 

Perhaps I don't know why they should, but I 
know that when they don't they speedily lose all 
their soldierly bearing and slouch like tired subway 
diggers. They throw courtesy, kindness, consider- 
ation to the winds. The soldiers of other countries 
look on them with disgust and horror. At Tornea, 
the port of entry into Finland, I got my first glimpse 
of this "free" Russian soldier. He was handing 
some papers to a trim British Tommy, who was 
straight as an arrow, clean cut and soldierly. The 
Russian slouched up to him, stuck out the papers in 
a dirty paw and blew a mouthful of cigarette smoke 
in his face. What the Tommy said to him was in 
English, and I am afraid was lost on the Russian, 
who walked off looking quite pleased with himself. 



16 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



In Petrograd I saw two of these "free" soldiers 
address, without even touching their caps, a French 
officer who spoke their language. The conversation 
was repeated to me thus: "Is it true that in your 
country, which calls itself a democracy, the soldiers 
have to stand in the presence of officers? Is it true 

that they " The interrogation proceeded no 

further, for the Frenchman replied quickly: "In 
the first place French soldiers do not walk up to an 
officer and begin a conversation uninvited, so I find 
it impossible to answer your questions." 

If he had been a Russian officer he would probably 
have been murdered on the spot. The death penalty 
having been abolished, and the police force having 
been reduced to an absurdity, murder has been made 
a safe and pleasant diversion. Murder of officers 
is so common that it is seldom even reported in the 
newspapers. When the truth is finally and officially 
published, if it ever is, it will be found that the bru- 
tal and horrible butchery of officers exceeds anything 
the outside world has ever imagined. I met a 
woman whose daughter went insane after her hus- 
band was killed in the fortress of Kronstadt, the 
port of Petrograd. He with a number of officers 
was imprisoned there, and some of the women went 
to the commander and begged permission to see and 
speak to their men. He grinned at them, and said: 
"They are just finishing their dinner. In a few min- 
utes you may see them." Shortly afterwards they 
were summoned to a room where the men sat around 
a table. They were tied in their chairs, and were 
all dead, with evidences of having been tortured. 

In the beginning of the revolution the soldiers of 



"ALL THE POWER TO THE SOVIET" 17 



Kronstadt killed the old officer commandant. They 
began by gouging out his eyes. When he was quite 
finished they brought in the second officer in com- 
mand and his young son, a lieutenant in the navy. 
"Will you join us, embrace the glorious revolution, 
or shall we kill you?" they demanded. "My duty 
is to command this garrison," replied the officer. 
"If you are going to kill me do it at once." They 
shot him, and threw his corpse on a pile of others in 
a ditch. The son they spared, and a few nights later 
the young man rescued his father's body and brought 
it home to be buried. This story was related under 
oath by him, but in the face of it and hundreds more 
like it the death penalty was abolished; nor would 
Kerensky consent to restore it, except for desertion 
at the front. 

At the Moscow congress, held in August, Keren- 
sky said, apologizing for even this small conces- 
sion: "As minister of justice I did away with the 
death penalty. As president of the provisional 
government I have asked for its reinstatement in 
case of desertion under fire." There was a burst of 
applause, and Kerensky exclaimed: "Do not ap- 
plaud. Don't you realize that we lose part of our 
souls when we consent to the death penalty? But 
if it is necessary to lose our souls to save Russia 
we must make the sacrifice." 

Petrograd and Moscow are literally running over 
with idle soldiers, many of whom have never done 
any fighting, and who loudly declare that they never 
intend to do any. They are supported by the gov- 
ernment, wear the army uniform, claim all the privi- 
leges of the soldier and live in complete and blissful 



18 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



idleness. The street cars are crowded with soldiers, 
who of course pay no fares. It is impossible for a 
woman to get a seat in a car. She is lucky if the 
soldiers permit her to stand in the aisle or on a plat- 
form. "Get off and walk, you boorzhoi," said a 
soldier to my interpreter one day when she was has- 
tening to keep an appointment with me. She got off 
and walked. I heard but one person dispute with 
a soldier. She was a street car conductor, one of 
the many women who have taken men's places since 
the war. She turned on a car full of these idlers 
riding free and littering the floor with sunflower 
seeds, which they eat as Americans eat peanuts, 
and told them exactly what she thought of them. 
It must have been extremely unflattering, for the 
other passengers looked joyful and only one sol- 
dier ventured any reply. "Now, comrade," said he, 
"you must not be hard on wounded men." 

"Wounded men !" exclaimed the woman. "If you 
ever get a wound it will be in the mouth from a 
broken bottle." There was a burst of laughter, in 
which even the soldiers joined. But after it sub- 
sided one of the men said defiantly: u Just the 
same, comrades, it was we who sent the Czar pack- 
ing." This opinion is shared by the Council of 
Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates. They have 
completely forgotten that the Duma had anything 
to do with the revolution. At their national con- 
gress of Soviets held in July, they solemnly debated 
whether or not they would permit the Duma to meet 
again, and it was a very small majority that decided 
in favor. But only on condition that the national 
body worked under the direction of the councils. 



CHAPTER III 



THE JULY REVOLUTION 

Every one who has read the old "Arabian 
Nights" will remember the story of the fisherman 
who caught a black bottle in one of his nets. When 
the bottle was uncorked a thin smoke began to curl 
out of the neck. The smoke thickened into a dense 
cloud and became a huge genie who made a slave of 
the fisherman. By the exercise of his wits the fish- 
erman finally succeeded in getting the genie back into 
the bottle, which he carefully corked and threw back 
into the sea. Kerensky tried desperately to get the 
genie back into the bottle, and every one hoped he 
might succeed. Up to date, however, there is little to 
indicate that the giant has even begun materially to 
shrink. Petrograd is not the only city where the 
Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates has 
assumed control of the destinies of the Russian peo- 
ple. Every town has its council, and there is no 
question, civil or military, which they do not feel 
capable of settling. 

I have before me a Petrograd newspaper clipping 
dated June 12. It is a dispatch from the city of 
Minsk, and states that the local soviet had debated 
the whole question of the resumption of the offen- 
sive, the Bolsheviki claiming that the question was 
general and that it ought to be left for the men at 

19 



2o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



the front to decide. They themselves were against 
an offensive, deeming it contrary to the interests of 
the international movement and profitable only to 
capitalists, foreign as well as Russian. Workers of 
all countries ought to struggle against their govern- 
ments and to break with all imperialist politics. The 
army ought to be made more democratic. This 
view prevailed, says the dispatch, by a vote of 123 
against 79. 

This is typical. In some cities the extreme so- 
cialists are in the majority, in others the milder Min- 
sheviki prevail. In Petrograd it has been a sort of 
neck and neck between them, with the Minsheviki 
in greater number. But as the seat of government 
Petrograd has had a great attraction for the Ger- 
man agents, and they are all Bolsheviki and very 
energetic. Early in the revolution they established 
two headquarters, one in the palace of Mme. Kches- 
sinskaia, a dancer, high in favor with some of the 
grand dukes, and another on the Viborg side, a man- 
ufacturing quarter of the city. Here in a big rifle 
factory and a few miles down the Neva in Kron- 
stadt, they kept a stock of firearms, rifles and ma- 
chine guns big enough to equip an army division. 

The leader of this faction, which was opposed to 
war against Germany but quite willing to shoot down 
unarmed citizens, was the notorious Lenine, a 
proved German agent whose power over the work- 
ing people was supreme until the uprisings in July, 
which were put down by the Cossacks. Lenine was 
at the height of his glory when the Root Commission 
visited Russia, and the provisional government was 
so terrorized by him that it hardly dared recognize 



THE JULY REVOLUTION 21 



the envoys from "capitalistic America." Only two 
members of the mission were ever permitted to ap- 
pear before the soviet or council. They were 
Charles Edward Russell and James Duncan, one a 
socialist and the other a labor representative. Both 
men made good speeches, but not a line of them, as 
far as I could discover, ever appeared in a socialist 
newspaper. In fact, the visit of the commission was 
ignored by the radical press, the only press which 
reaches 75 per cent of the Russian people. 

In order to make perfectly clear the situation as 
it existed during the spring and summer, and as it 
exists to-day, I am going to describe two events 
which I witnessed last July. Both of these were at- 
tempts of the extreme socialists to bring about a 
separate peace with Germany, and had they suc- 
ceeded in their plans would have done so. More- 
over, they might easily have resulted in the dismem- 
berment of Russia. 

The 1 8th of June, Russian style, July 1 in our cal- 
endar, is a day that stands out vividly in my memory. 
For some time the Lenine element of the Work- 
men's and Soldiers' Council had planned to get up 
a demonstration against the non-socialist members 
of the provisional government and against the fur- 
ther progress of the war. The Minshevik element 
of the council, backed by the government, spoiled the 
plan by voting for a non-political demonstration in 
which all could take part, and which should be a me- 
morial for the men and women killed in the Febru- 
ary revolution, and buried in the Field of Mars, a 
great open square once used for military reviews. 
As the plan was finally adopted it provided that 



22 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



every one who wanted to might march in this pa- 
rade, and no one was to carry arms. Great was the 
wrath of the Lenineites, but the peaceful demonstra- 
tion came off, and it must have given the government 
its first thrill of encouragement, for events that day 
proved that the Bolsheviki or Lenine followers were 
cowards at heart and could be handled by any firm 
and fearless authority. 

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, this eigh- 
teenth of June, when I walked up the Nevski Pros- 
pect, the Fifth avenue of Petrograd, watching the 
endless procession that filled the street. Two-thirds 
of the marchers were men, mostly soldiers, but wo- 
men were present also, and a good many children. 
Red flags and red banners were plentiful, the Bol- 
shevik banners reading "Down with the Ten Capi- 
talistic Ministers," "Down with the War," "Down 
with the Duma," "All the Power to the Soviets," 
and presenting a very belligerent appearance. 

With me that day was another woman writer, Miss 
Beatty of the San Francisco Bulletin, and as we 
walked along we agreed that almost anything could 
happen, and that we ought not to allow ourselves 
to get into a crowd. For once the journalistic pas- 
sion for seeing the whole thing must give place to a 
decent regard for safety. We had just agreed that 
if shooting began we would duck into the nearest 
court or doorway, when something did happen — 
something so sudden that its very character could 
not be defined. If it was a shot, as some claimed, 
we did not hear it. All we heard was a noise some- 
thing like a sudden wind. That great crowd march- 
ing along the broad Nevski simply exploded. There 



Typical crowd on the Nevski Prospect during the Bolshevik or Max- 
imalist risings. 



THE JULY REVOLUTION 



is no other word to express the panic that turned 
it without any warning into a fleeing, fighting, strug- 
ling, terror-stricken mob. The people rushed in 
every direction, knocking down everything in their 
track. Miss Beatty went down like a log, but she 
was up again in a flash, and we flung ourselves 
against a high iron railing guarding a shop window. 
Directly beside us lay a soldier who had had his 
head cut open by the glass sign against which he was 
thrown. Many others were injured. 

Fortunately the panic was shortlived. It lasted 
hardly five minutes, as a matter of fact. All around 
the cry rose that nothing was the matter, that the 
Cossacks were not coming. The Cossacks, once the 
terror of the Russian people, in this upheaval have 
become the strongest supporters of the government. 
Nothing could better demonstrate the anti-govern- 
ment intention of the Bolsheviki than their present 
fear and hatred of the Cossacks. So the "Tava- 
rishi" took up their battered banners and resumed 
their march. No one ever found out what started 
the panic. Some said that a shot was fired from a 
window on one of the banners. Others said that the 
shot was merely a tire blowing out. Some were cer- 
tain that they heard a cry of "Cossacks," and some 
cynics suggested that the pick-pockets, a numerous 
and enterprising class just now, started the panic 
in the interests of business. This was the only dis- 
turbance I witnessed. The newspapers reported two 
more in the course of the day. A young girl watch- 
ing the procession from the sidewalk suddenly de- 
cided to commit suicide, and the shot she sent 
through her heart precipitated another panic. Still 



24 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



a third one occurred when two men got into a fight 
and one of them drew a knife. 

The instant flight of the crowds and especially of 
the soldiers must have given Kerensky hope that the 
giant could be got back into the bottle, especially 
since on that very day, June 18, Russian style, the 
army on one of the fronts advanced and fought a 
victorious engagement. The town went mad with 
joy over that victory, showing, I think, that the heart 
of the Russian people is still intensely loyal to the 
allies, and deadly sick of the fantastic program of 
the extreme socialists. Crowds surged up and down 
the street bearing banners, flags, pictures of Ke- 
rensky. They thronged before the Marie Palace, 
where members of the government, officers, soldiers, 
sailors made long and rapturous speeches, full of 
patriotism. They sang, they shouted, all day and 
nearly all night. When they were not shouting 
"Long live Kerensky!" they were saying "This is 
the last of the Lenineites." But it wasn't. The 
Bolsheviki simply retired to their dancer's palace, 
their Viborg retreats and their Kronstadt strong- 
hold, and made another plan. 

On Monday night, July 2, or in our calendar July 
15, broke out what is known as the July revolution, 
the last bloody demonstration of the Bolsheviki. I 
had been absent from town for two weeks and re- 
turned to Petrograd early in the morning after the 
demonstration began. I stepped out of the Nicholai 
station and looked around for a droshky. Not one 
was in sight. No street cars were running. The 
town looked deserted. Silence reigned, a queer, sin- 
ister kind of a silence. "What in the world has hap- 



THE JULY REVOLUTION 



pened?" I asked myself. A droshky appeared and I 
hailed it. When the izvostchik mentioned his price 
for driving me to my hotel I gasped, but I was two 
miles from home and there were no trams. So I 
accepted and we made the journey. Few people 
were abroad, and when I reached the hotel I found 
the entrance blocked with soldiers. The man behind 
the desk looked aghast to see me walk in, and he 
hastened to tell me that the Bolsheviki were making 
trouble again and all citizens had been requested to 
stay indoors until it was over. 

I stayed indoors long enough to bathe and change, 
and then, as everything seemed quiet, I went out. 
Confidence was returning and the streets looked al- 
most normal again. I walked down the Morskaia, 
finding the main telephone exchange so closely 
guarded that no one was even allowed to walk on 
the sidewalk below it. That telephone exchange 
had been fiercely attacked during the February revo- 
lution, and it was one of the most hotly disputed 
strategic positions in the capital. Later I am going 
to tell something of the part played in the revolution 
by the loyal telephone girls of Petrograd. A big 
armored car was plainly to be seen in the courtyard 
of the building, and many soldiers were there alert 
and ready. I stopped in at the big bookshop where 
English newspapers (a month old) were to be pur- 
chased, and bought one. The Journal de Petrograd, 
the French morning paper, I found had not been is- 
sued that day. Then I strolled down the Nevski. I 
had not gone far when I heard rifle shooting and 
then the sound, not to be mistaken, of machine gun 
fire. People turned in their tracks and bolted for 



26 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



the side streets. I bolted too, and made a record 
dash for the Hotel d'Europe. The firing went on 
for about an hour, and when I ventured out again 
it was to see huge gray motor trucks laden with 
armed men, rushing up and down the streets, guns 
bristling from all sides and machine guns fore and 
aft. 

What had happened was this. The "Red 
Guard," an armed band of workmen allied with the 
Bolsheviki, together with all the extremists who 
could be rallied by Lenine, and these included some 
very young boys, had been given arms and told to 
"go out in the streets." This is a phrase that 
usually means go out and kill everything in sight. 
In this case the men were assured that the Kron- 
stadt regiments would join them, that cruisers would 
come up the river and the whole government would 
be delivered into the hands of the Bolsheviki. The 
Kronstadt men did come in sufficient numbers to 
surround and hold for two days the Tauride Palace, 
where the Duma meets and the provisional govern- 
ment had its headquarters. The only reason why the 
bloodshed was not greater was that the soldiers in 
the various garrisons around the city refused to come 
out and fight. The sane members of the Soviet 
had begged them to remain in their casernes, and 
they obeyed. All day Tuesday and Wednesday the 
armed motor cars of the Bolsheviki dashed from 
barrack to barrack daring the soldiers to come out, 
and whenever they found a group of soldiers to fire 
on, they fired. Most of these loyal soldiers are 
Cossacks, and they are hated by the Bolsheviki. 

Tuesday night there was some real fighting, for 



THE JULY REVOLUTION 27 



the Cossacks went to the Tauride Palace and freed 
the besieged ministers at the cost of the lives of a 
dozen or more men. Then the Cossacks started out 
to capture the Bolshevik armored cars. When they 
first went out it was with rifles only, which are mere 
toy pistols against machine guns. After one little 
skirmish I counted seventeen dead Cossack horses, 
and there were more farther down the street. As 
soon as the Cossacks were given proper arms they 
captured the armored trucks without much trouble. 
The Bolsheviki threw away their guns and fled like 
rabbits for their holes. Nevertheless a condition 
of warfare was maintained for the better part of a 
week, and the final burst of Bolshevik activity gave 
Petrograd, already sick of bloodshed, one moire 
night of terror. That night I shall not soon forget. 

The day had been quiet and we thought the 
trouble was over. I went to bed at half-past ten 
and was in my first sleep when a fusilade broke out, 
as it seemed, almost under my window. I sat up in 
bed, and within a few minutes, the machine guns had 
begun their infernal noise, like rattlesnakes in the 
prairie grass. I flung on a dressing gown and ran 
down the hall to a friend's room. She dressed 
quickly and we went down stairs to the room of 
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragette, 
which gave a better view of the square than our own. 
There until nearly morning we sat without any 
lights, of course, listening to repeated bursts of fir- 
ing, and the wicked put-put-put-put of the machine 
guns, watching from behind window draperies, the 
brilliant headlights of armored motors rushing into 
action, hearing the quick feet of men and horses has- 



28 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



tening from their barracks. We did not go out. 
All a correspondent can do in the midst of a fight 
is to lie down on the ground and make himself as 
flat as possible, unless he can get into a shop where 
he hides under a table or a bench. That never 
seemed worth while to me, and I have no tales to 
tell of prowess under fire. 

I listened to that night battle from the safety of 
the hotel, going the next day to see the damage done 
by the guns. A contingent of mutinous soldiers and 
sailors from Kronstadt, which had been expected for 
several days by the Lenineites, had come up late, 
still spoiling for a fight; had planted guns on the 
street in front of the Bourse and at the head of the 
Palace Bridge across the Neva, and simply mowed 
down as many people as were abroad at the hour. 
Nobody knows, except the authorities, how many 
were killed, but when we awoke the next day we 
discovered that, for a time at least, the power of the 
Bolsheviki had been broken. The next day the mu- 
tinous regiments were disbanded in disgrace. Pet- 
rograd was put under martial law, the streets were 
guarded with armored cars, thousands of Cossacks 
were brought in to police the place, and orders for 
the arrest of Lenine and his lieutenants were issued. 
But it was openly boasted by the Bolsheviki that the 
government was afraid to touch Lenine, and certain 
it is that he escaped into Sweden, and possibly from 
there into Germany. 

I should not like to believe that the government 
actually connived at his escape, since there was 
always the menace of his return, and the absolute 
certainty that he would remain an outside directing 



THE JULY REVOLUTION 



force in the Bolshevik campaign. It is more prob- 
able that in the confusion of those days of fighting 
he was smuggled down the Neva in a small yacht 
or motor boat to the fortress of Kronstadt, and from 
there was conveyed across the mine strewn Baltic 
into Sweden. Rumor had it that he had been seen 
well on his way to Germany, but it is more likely 
that his employers kept him nearer the scene of his 
activities. He was guilty of more successful intrigue, 
more murder and violent death than most of the Kai- 
ser's faithful, and deserves an extra size iron cross, 
if there is such a thing. In spite of all that he has 
done he has thousands of adherents still in Russia, 
people who believe that he is "sincere but mis- 
guided," to use an overworked phrase. The rest of 
the fighting mob were driven from their palace, 
which they had previously looted and robbed of 
about twenty thousand dollars' worth of costly fur- 
niture, china, silver and art objects. They were 
hunted out of their rifle factory, and finally sur- 
rendered to the government after they had captured, 
but failed to hold the fortress of Peter and Paul. 
They surrendered but were they arrested and pun- 
ished? Not a bit of it. They were allowed to go 
scot free, only being required to give up their arms. 
The government existed only at the will of the mob, 
and the mob would not tolerate the arrest of "Tava- 
rishi." 



CHAPTER IV 



AN HOUR OF HOPE 

There was an hour when the sunrise of hope 
seemed to be dawning for the Russian people, when 
the madness of the extreme socialists seemed to be 
curbed, the army situation in hand, and a real gov- 
ernment established. This happened in late July, 
and was symbolized in the great public funeral given 
eight Cossack soldiers slain by the Bolsheviki in 
the July days of riot and bloodshed in Petrograd. 
I do not know how many Cossacks were killed. 
Only eight were publicly buried. It is entirely pos- 
sible that the government did not wish the Bolshe- 
viki to know the full result of their murder feast, 
and for that reason gave private burial to some of 
the dead. The public funeral served as a tribute to 
the loyal soldiers, a warning to the extremists that 
the country stood back of the war, and a notice to all 
concerned that the days of revolution were over and 
that henceforth the government meant to govern 
without the help or interference of the Tavarishi, 
or comrades in the socialist ranks. The moment 
was propitious for the government. The Council 
of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates was in a 
chastened frame of mind, caused first by the running 
amuck of the Bolshevik element, the unmasking and 
flight of Lenine, and next by a lost battle on the 

30 



AN HOUR OF HOPE 



3i 



Galician front, and the disgraceful desertion of 
troops under fire. 

The best elements in the council supported the 
new coalition ministry, although it did not have a 
Socialist majority, and it claimed the right to work 
independently of the council. The Cossack funeral 
was really a government demonstration, and those 
of us who saw it believed for the moment that it 
marked the beginning of a new era in Russia's 
troubled progress toward democracy and freedom. 
The services were held in St. Isaac's Cathedral, the 
largest church in Petrograd, and one of the most 
magnificent in a country of magnificent churches. 
The bodies, in coffins covered with silver cloth, were 
brought to the cathedral on a Friday afternoon at 5 
o'clock, accompanied by many members of their regi- 
ments and representatives of others. The flower- 
heaped coffins surrounded by flaming candles filled 
the space below the holy gate leading to the high 
altar; around them knelt the soldiers and the weep- 
ing women relatives of the dead, while a solemn 
service for the repose of their souls was chanted. 

In the Russian church no organ or other instru- 
mental music is permitted, but the singing is of an 
order of excellence quite unknown in other countries. 
Part of a priest's education is in music, and the male 
choirs are most carefully trained and conducted. 
They have the highest tenor and the lowest bass 
voices in the world in those Russian church choirs, 
and there is no effect of the grandest pipe organ 
which they cannot produce. They sing nothing but 
the best music, and their masses are written for them 
by the greatest of Russian composers. Many times 



32 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



I have thrilled to their singing, but at this memorial 
service to brave men slain in defense of their coun- 
try I was fairly overwhelmed by it. I do not know 
what they sang, but it was a solemn, yet triumphant 
symphony of grief, religious ecstasy, faith and long- 
ing. It soared to a great climax, and it ended in a 
prolonged phrase sung so softly that it seemed to 
come as from a great distance, from Heaven itself. 
The whole vast congregation was on its knees, in 
tears. 

The service in the cathedral next morning was 
long and elaborate, and it was early afternoon be- 
fore the procession started for the Alexander 
Nevski monastery where a common grave had been 
prepared for the murdered men. Back of the open 
white hearses walked the bereaved women and chil- 
dren, bareheaded, in simple peasant black. Thou- 
sands of Cossacks, also bareheaded, many weeping 
bitterly, followed. The dead men's horses were led 
by soldiers. The Metropolitan of Petrograd and 
every other dignitary of the church was in the pro- 
cession. I saw Miliukoff, Rodzianko and other celeb- 
rities. Women of rank walked side by side with 
working women. Many nurses were there in their 
flowing white coifs. There were uncounted hun- 
dreds of wreaths and floral offerings. The bands 
played impressive funeral marches. But there was 
not a single red flag in the procession. 

There was, of course, Kerensky, and his appear- 
ance was one of the dramatic events of the day. I 
watched the procession from a hotel window, and I 
saw just as the hearses were passing a large black 
motor car winding its way slowly through the crowd 



AN HOUR OF HOPE 



33 



that thronged the street. Just as the last hearse 
passed the door of the car opened and Kerensky 
sprang out and took his place in the procession, 
walking alone hatless and with bowed head after 
the coffins. He was dressed in the plain service uni- 
form of a field officer, and his brown jacket was des- 
titute of any decorations. The crowd when it saw 
him went mad with enthusiasm; forgot for a mo- 
ment the solemnity of the occasion and rushed for- 
ward to acclaim him. "Kerensky! Kerensky!" 

It was his first appearance as premier, and prac- 
tically dictator of Russia, and he would not have 
been human if he had not felt a thrill of triumph at 
this reception. But with a splendid gesture he waved 
the crowd to silence, and bade them stand quietly 
back. At first it seemed impossible to restrain them, 
but the people in the front ranks joined hands and 
formed a living chain that kept the crowds back, and 
in a few moments order was restored. There was 
something fine and symbolic about that action, those 
joined hands that stopped what might have created 
a panic and turned the government's demonstration 
into a fiasco. That spontaneous bit of social think- 
ing and acting restored order better than a police 
force could have done, and it left in me the convic- 
tion that whenever the Russian people join hands in 
behalf of their country they are going to work out a 
splendid civilization. If they had only done it after 
that day ! But the new coalition ministry, with Presi- 
dent Kerensky, the popular idol, substituted for 
Lvoff, who had grown wearied and dispirited by the 
struggle, soon found itself facing the same old sea 
of troubles that had swamped the former ministries. 



34 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

The democracy, created largely by Kerensky, in 
a country which is not yet ready for self-government, 
had split up into many anarchistic groups. It had 
become a Frankenstein too huge and too crazy with 
power to be handled by any man less than a Na- 
poleon Bonaparte, and Kerensky is not a Bonaparte. 
Perhaps he had the brain of a Bonaparte, as he cer- 
tainly had the charm and magnetism. It may be 
that he lacked the iron will or the deathless courage. 
It may only be that his frail physical health stood 
in the way of resolution. Whatever the explanation, 
the fact remains that Kerensky never once was 
able to take that huge, disorganized, uneducated, 
restless, yearning Russian mob by the scruff of the 
neck and compel it to listen to reason. Apparently, 
also, he was unable or unwilling to let any one else do 
it, as the mysterious Korniloff incident seems to prove. 
The story of the disintegration of the Russian army 
has been described in many dispatches. Later I am 
going to tell what I saw of the Russian army, and 
what I know of the demoralization at the front. 
The state of things was bad, but it was by no means 
hopeless, as it is fast becoming. That Rus- 
sian army, I confidently believe, could, as late as Au- 
gust, 19 1 7, have been reorganized, renovated and 
made into an effective fighting force. It is very evi- 
dent that it still has possibilities, because the Ger- 
mans still keep an enormous number of troops on 
the eastern front. They know that the Russians can 
fight, and they fear that they will fight, as soon as 
they are given a real leader. Military leaders they 
do not lack, as the Germans also know. Most of 
the old commanders, the worthless, corrupt hangers- 



AN HOUR OF HOPE 



35 



on of the old regime, are gone now. Some are dead, 
some in prison, some relegated to obscurity. The 
men who are left are real soldiers, good lighters, 
true allies of America, France and England. Espe- 
cially is this true of the once feared and hated Cos- 
sack leaders. 

The Cossack regiments to the last man had sup- 
ported the provisional government, and were whole- 
heartedly in favor of fighting the war to a finish. 
There are about five million of these Cossacks, and 
practically every able-bodied man is a soldier. And 
what a soldier! Except our own cowboys, there 
never were such horsemen. No troops in the world 
excel them in bravery and fighting power. They 
are a proud race and would never serve under offi- 
cers save those of their own kind. I asked a young 
Cossack at the front where his officers got their 
training. He had spent some ten years in Chicago 
and spoke English like one of our own men. "We 
train them in the field," he said with a smile. "Every 
one of us is a potential officer, and when our highest 
commander drops in battle, there is always a man to 
take his place. , ' 

The Cossack has no head for politics. He agrees 
on the government he is going to support and he 
serves that government with an undivided mind. 
When he served the Czar he did the Czar's bidding. 
When he decided to serve the new democracy he 
could be depended on to do it. He has done no fra- 
ternizing with wily Germans in the trenches. He 
has listened to no German propaganda in Petrograd. 
He wants to fight the war to a successful end, and 
then he wants to go back to his home on the peaceful 



36 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



Don river, or in the wild Urals and cultivate his 
fields and vineyards. 

Of all Cossack leaders the most picturesque and 
the most celebrated as a military genius was Gen. 
Korniloff. His life and adventures would fill vol- 
umes. He fought his way up from a penniless 
boyhood to a successful manhood. He knows Rus- 
sia from one end to the other, and speaks almost 
every dialect known to the empire, and several for- 
eign languages in addition, especially those of the 
Orient. He is a small, wiry man with a beard, and 
the only time I ever saw him he was surrounded by 
a bodyguard of tall Turkestan Cossacks wearing 
long gray tunics, huge caps of Persian lamb and a 
perfectly beautiful collection of silver-mounted 
swords, daggers and pistols. In a pictorial sense 
Gen. Korniloff was quite obscured by them. 

Following a series of disasters and wholesale de- 
sertions at the front, the late provisional govern- 
ment announced that the chief command of the army 
had been given to Gen. Korniloff. The command 
was accepted with certain conditions attached to the 
acceptance. Gen. Korniloff would not be a com- 
mander in any limited or modified sense of the word. 
He demanded absolute power and control over all 
troops, both at the front and in the rear. He wanted 
to abolish the committees of soldiers who admin- 
istered all regimental affairs, and who even decided 
what commands the men might or might not obey. 
Gen. Korniloff could never tolerate these bodies. 
Whenever he visited an army division he asked: 
"Have your regiments any committees ?" And if the 
answer was yes, he immediately gave the order: 



AN HOUR OF HOPE 



37 



"Dissolve them." One of the principal demands made 
by Gen. Korniloff on the provisional government 
was the right to inflict the death penalty on desert- 
ers, both in the field and in the rear. I have writ- 
ten of the thousands of idle soldiers in Petrograd, 
and of the expressed refusal of many of them to go 
to the front when ordered. There was no secret 
about this, nor any concealment of the fact that of 
many thousands of soldiers sent to the front at va- 
rious times since the early spring, about two-thirds 
deserted on the way. They captured trains — hos- 
pital trains in some instances — turned the passengers 
out, left the wounded lying along the tracks, and 
forced the trainmen to take them back to Petrograd, 
or wherever they wanted to go. 

Kerensky had tried every means in his power to 
stop this shameful business. He had fixed three 
separate dates on which all soldiers must rejoin their 
regiments and must obey orders to advance. He 
had published manifestoes notifying these cowards 
and slackers that unless they did report for duty 
they would be declared traitors to the revolution, 
their families would be deprived of all army bene- 
fits and they would not be allowed to share in the 
distribution of land when the new agrarian policy 
went into effect. These manifestoes were absolutely 
ignored. The desertions continued. Army disinte- 
gration increased. Anarchy pure and simple reigned 
on all fronts and in the rear. Soldiers who were 
willing to fight were afraid to, because there was 
every probability of their own comrades shooting 
them in the back if they obeyed their officers. The 
state of mind of the officers can be imagined per- 



38 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



haps — it cannot be described. Many committed sui- 
cide in the madness of their shame and despair. 

Gen. Korniloff wanted to deal with this horrible 
situation in the only possible way, by shooting all de- 
serters. This may sound drastic. No doubt it will 
to every copperhead and pro-German in this coun- 
try. But remember, for every man who deserts on 
that Russian front some American boy will have to 
suffer. We shall have to fight for the Russians, we^ 
shall have to pay the awful price of their defection. 
Gen. Korniloff, a true patriot, knew this, and he 
wanted to save his country from that dishonor. 
Kerensky apparently could not endure the thought 
of those firing squads. Or else he did not dare to 
risk the wrath of the soviet. There is no doubt that 
he would have courted great personal danger, it may 
be certain death, but what of it? There is no doubt 
that Gen. Korniloff, if he saved the situation, would 
loom larger as a popular hero than Kerensky, but 
what of it? The whole country, all of it that re- 
tained its sanity and its patriotism, looked for Gen. 
Korniloff to establish a military dictatorship in the 
army. There was never any question of his assum- 
ing the civil power. There was never any indication 
that he wanted it. 

But there was this question — what political party 
in Russia was going to dominate the constituent as- 
sembly, that consummation which has been post- 
poned many times, but which cannot be indefinitely 
postponed? The Social Revolutionary party, of 
which Kerensky was a member, seems to have had a 
clear majority, but there was little organization, and 
the Socialists were split up into numerous groups. In 



AN HOUR OF HOPE 



39 



one city election recently there were eighteen tickets 
in the field, most of them separate Socialist parties. 
The Cossacks, solidly lined up behind Korniloff, an- 
nounced that in the coming constituent assembly 
election they would form a bloc with the Constitu- 
tional Democrats and the moderate party known as 
the Cadets, of which Prof. Paul Miliukoff is the 
leader. That bloc might dominate the constituent 
assembly. If it did the Bolshevik element in the 
Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates 
throughout the country would be overpowered and 
discredited. The "social revolution" which the 
councils still insisted must come out of the political 
revolution might be modified. 

Outside of the secret conclaves of the provisional 
government, outside of the inner circles of political 
life in Russia, there is no one who knows the exact 
truth of the so-called Korniloff rebellion. It is 
known that a congress was held in Moscow in late 
August, in which Kerensky made one of his great 
speeches, absolutely capturing his audience and once 
more hypnotizing a large public into the belief that 
he could restore order in Russia. Korniloff ap- 
peared, and aroused great enthusiasm, as he always 
does. Everybody seemed to think that the two lead- 
ers would get together and agree on a program. 
But they did not get together, and the government 
announced the "rebellion" and disgrace of Korniloff. 
Two more things were announced: that the Bolshe- 
viki had gained a majority in the Petrograd Council 
of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates, and that Le- 
nine was on his way back to Russia to address a 
"democratic congress," which had for its objects the 



40 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



abolishment of the Duma and the calling of a par- 
liament chosen from its membership. Russia's hour 
of hope had come and gone. When will it come 
again? 



CHAPTER V 



THE COMMITTEE MANIA 

In writing a plain statement of the condition of 
anarchy into which Russia has fallen, I am very far 
from wishing to create a prejudice against the Rus- 
sian people. I don't want anybody to distrust or 
scorn the Russians. I want the American people to 
understand their situation in order that, through 
sympathy, patience and common sense, they can find 
some way of helping them out of the blind morass 
that surrounds them. All the educated Russians I 
have met like Americans and trust them. They will 
not soon forget that the United States was the first 
great power to recognize the new government and 
to hail the revolution. The American ambassador, 
David R. Francis, is easily the most popular diplo- 
mat in Petrograd. Every one knows him, and he 
rarely appeared in a meeting or convention without 
being applauded. Over and over again, during my 
three months' visit to Russia, I was told that it was 
to America they looked for help and guidance, and 
after the war they want to enter into the closest com- 
mercial relations with us. One business man said to 
me just before I left: "Tell your people that we 
will never trade with Germany again unless the 
Americans force us to do so. If they will supply us 
1 with chemicals, with manufactures and machinery, 

41 



42 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



we will gladly buy them. If they will send us ex- 
perts for our manufacturing plants we will be de- 
lighted to have them instead of the Germans we 
used to employ, who never taught our people 
any of their knowledge because they did not want 
us to develop." 

The Russians want us to help them establish pub- 
lic schools ; to show them how to build and operate 
great railroad systems; to farm scientifically; to do 
any number of things we have learned to do well. 
We mustn't despise the Russians, we must help them. 
And we can't do that unless we understand them. 
Take, for example, the army situation. It is very 
bad. The mass of the soldiers are in rebellion 
against all authority. But consider the past history, 
the very recent past history of those soldiers. Aside 
from brutal personal treatment at the hands of some 
of the officers, they were cheated and starved and 
neglected by the bureaucracy in Petrograd, and then 
again by their commanders at the front. The Rus- 
sian soldier's wants are simple enough. He eats the 
same food seven days in the week and rarely com- 
plains. This food consists of soup made of salt 
meat and cabbage; kasha, a porridge made of buck- 
wheat; black bread and tea. "Ivan" wears coarse 
clothes and big, clumsy boots, and he has none of the 
small comforts we think essential to the fighting man 
in the field. But slight as the Russian soldier's 
equipment is he did not invariably get it in the old 
days. It was stolen from him by a band of official 
crooks with which the war department and the army 
were honeycombed. Every department of the army, 
from the commissariat to the Red Cross, was full 




°> 

(L> 



a 



u 
o 

U. 

S3 
3 

<D 




THE COMMITTEE MANIA 



of corruption and graft. The traffic in army sup- 
plies and ammunition, even in hospital supplies, that 
went on constantly beggars description. Gen. Suk- 
homlinoff, the former minister of war, who has 
been tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for 
the part he played in this business, was only one of 
the big thieves. Under him were myriads more, and 
among them all the soldiers were often stripped of 
their overcoats in the dead of winter, and of half 
of their rations the year round. When a Russian 
soldier was badly wounded he might as well have 
been shot as succored. I have seen these men, piti- 
ful wretches, having lost one or more arms or legs, 
blind perhaps, or frightfully disfigured, begging in 
the streets of Petrograd. Clad in tattered uniform, 
pale and miserable, these poor soldiers stand on the 
steps of the churches or on street corners and beg 
a few kopecks from the passersby. There is no such 
thing as a pension for them, no soldiers' homes. 
They suffered for a country that knew no such thing 
as gratitude. Russia sent her men into battle with- 
out sufficient arms or ammunition with which to fight. 
It fed them to the German guns without mercy, that 
a band of looters in the government might buy sables 
and bet on horse races. It let them shiver and 
freeze in shoddy uniforms that army contractors 
might grow rich. And, after they were wounded, 
it let them beg their bread. 

Small wonder, then, after the revolution, that 
there was a great popular demand for swift justice 
for the soldiers. The provisional government an- 
nounced that henceforth each regiment should have 
an elected committee, an executive body which 



44 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



should have entire charge of regimental affairs. 
Food, clothing, supplies of all kinds, were to pass 
through the hands of these committees, and they 
were to hear and pass on all complaints. The com- 
mittees were the vocal organs of the army. For 
the first time in Russian history the soldier was al- 
lowed to speak. The plan might have worked excel- 
lently had the provisional government not made the 
mistake of too much zeal in democratizing the army. 
It gorged the soldiers with freedom, gave them such 
heady doses of self-government that they got drunk 
on the idea and ran amuck like so many crazed Ma- 
lays. Kerensky decreed that the soldiers need not 
salute their officers. "Well then, we won't," they 
said. "And just to show how free we are we won't 
wash our faces, or wear clean clothes, or touch our 

caps to women, or stand up straight " and from 

that it was an easy journey to "We won't take any 
orders from anybody." 

The government told the soldiers to elect their 
own officers, and they did, after butchering a thou- 
sand or so of their old ones. They elected them 
wisely in some instances, but in a great many more 
they did not. They chose men, not for their ca- 
pacity to lead in a military way, but for their politi- 
cal views. In a Bolshevik regiment the best Bol 
sheviki were elected. If there was a Minshevik ma- 
jority the new officers were pretty sure to be Min- 
sheviki. And after they were elected nobody re- 
spected them, nor did they dare give orders. But 
of all the madness that took possession of the "free" 
soldiers, the committee madness went farthest. The 
Russians love to talk. To make speeches, to heckle 



THE COMMITTEE MANIA 



and be heckled is the joy of their lives. The com- 
mittee gave them a new chance to talk, and they got 
the habit of calling a committee meeting on every 
conceivable occasion. Petrograd heard with hor- 
ror last summer that the men in the trenches, when 
ordered to advance, actually called meetings to dis- 
cuss the orders and to vote whether or not they were 
to be followed. They did this at times when the 
Germans were at the very gates of an important 
strategic point. 

Even in the hospitals it got so that the doctors 
and the nurses were without authority. If a man 
was ordered to take a pill he wanted to call a com- 
mittee meeting to discuss the thing. It is an actual 
fact that men refused to take treatment or un- 
dergo operations until they had consulted the Tava- 
rishi about it. From that to refusing to obey any 
orders is a short step, and Red Cross nurses have 
told me some fantastic stories about life in Russian 
lazarets. Some wounded men refused to take their 
clothes off and insisted on wearing them, boots and 
all, to bed. Others refused to go to bed at night, pre- 
ferring to snooze during the day and wander around 
in pajamas and dressing gowns at night. Some in- 
sisted on being discharged before they should be, 
while others, on being discharged, declined to go. 

They were not like that in all hospitals, of course. 
Ivan is a great child, and very often he is a stupid 
and an unruly child. But often he is good, espe- 
cially when he is sick and suffering and in need of 
women's care and kindness. I don't want to de- 
scribe the bad hospital conditions without admitting 
that they have the other kind, too, in Russia. I re- 



46 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

member seeing at the corner of a street below a big 
lazaret in Petrograd a dozen discharged wounded 
men and a group of nurses and orderlies. They 
were waiting for the tram which was to carry the 
men to the railroad station. Some still wore band- 
ages, some were on crutches, some walked with the 
aid of sticks. Two were blind. But all were wildly 
happy at the prospect of going home to the old vil- 
lage. The nurses and orderlies shared in the ex- 
citement. Some of them were going to the station, 
and had their arms full of bundles, clothes, food 
and souvenirs of battle. One nurse carried a com- 
petent looking cork leg, the future prop of a pale 
young fellow on crutches. The car swung around 
the corner, full of passengers, idle soldiers mostly, 
but even they, at the command of the energetic sister, 
vacated their seats for the invalids. They climbed 
aboard, and those who were most helpless were 
lifted. The cork leg was handed in through an open 
window and delivered to one of the more able-bodied 
men. There had been plenty of time for farewells 
before, but parting was difficult, and for five minutes 
after boarding the car the men continued to shake 
hands with the nurses, to shout last messages, and to 
kiss their hands to those on the sidewalk. The 
nurses patted their charges' arms and shoulders, and 
called anxious admonitions. "Take care of that leg, 
Ivan Feodorovitch. You know how to bandage it. 
Don't try to walk too much, and keep out of the 
sun." You didn't have to know a word of Russian 
to understand what those nurses were saying. 

The street car conductor wrung her hands and 
begged to be allowed to go on. The time schedule 



THE COMMITTEE MANIA 47 



had to be observed. "Please, sister, please," she en- 
treated, and at last she was permitted to ring the 
bell and send her car forward. As it turned the 
corner the men were still waving and laughing and 
wiping the tears from their cheeks. I don't believe 
those men had called any committee meetings before 
obeying their nurses, or ever reminded the doctors 
that it was a free country now and they could take 
medicine or not as they pleased. 

You certainly got tired of that overworked phrase 
"It's a free country now." You hear it on all sides 
in Russia. "It's a free country," says a man with 
a third-class ticket taking possession of a first-class 
compartment. "It's a free country," declares a sol- 
dier, tossing a handful of sunflower seed shells on a 
woman's white shoes in a street car. "It's a free 
country," say a group of men, stripping off their 
clothes before a crowd of women and children and 
taking a bath in the Neva. This occurs frequently 
on the Admiralty quay, a great pleasure resort in 
Petrograd. 

"They called them Sans Culottes during the 
French Revolution," said a clever woman writer in 
one of the newspapers. "Our men will go down to 
fame as Sans Calegons. The difference, perhaps, be- 
tween a political and a social revolution." The first 
French phrase means without trousers. The second 
carries the denuding process to its concluding stage. 

In this kind of a free country nobody is free. Try 
to imagine how it would be in Washington, in the 
office of the secretary of the treasury, let us say, if 
a committee of the American Federation of Labor 
should walk in and say: "We have come to control 



48 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



you. Produce your books and all your confidential 
papers." This is what happens to cabinet ministers 
in Russia, and will continue until they succeed in 
forming a government responsible only to the elec- 
torate, and not a slave to the Council of Workmen's 
and Soldiers' Delegates. Of course, the simile is 
grossly unfair to the American Federation of La- 
bor. Our organized labor men are the most intelli- 
gent working people in the community, and most of 
them have had a long experience in citizenship. 
Above all, their loyalty, as a body, has been amply 
demonstrated. The Council of Workmen's and Sol- 
diers' Delegates has among its members loyal, hon- 
est, intelligent men and women. But it has also a 
number of extreme radicals, people who would dis- 
honor the country by concluding a separate peace 
with Germany, and who care nothing for the inter- 
ests of any group except their own. Nobody in 
Russia has very much experience in citizenship, and 
the working people have less than others. Yet the 
soviet, to give the council its local name, deems it- 
self quite capable of passing on all affairs of state, 
not only in Russia but in the allied countries as well. 
The Soviets have had the presumption to announce 
that they are going to name the peace terms, al- 
though Russia has virtually ceased to fight. "No 
annexations or contributions," is the formula, very 
evidently made in Germany. I am sure that not one 
in a thousand knows what this means. 

"Have you ever thought," I asked a member of 
the Petrograd council, "what your program would 
mean to the working people of Belgium? Don't 
you think that the farmers and artisans of northern 



THE COMMITTEE MANIA 49 



France are entitled to compensation for their ruined 
homes and blasted lives?" 

"Yes, but not from Germany," was the astound- 
ing reply. "All countries should contribute." 

"If I were a cashier in a bank and stole a million 
dollars of the depositors' money, do you think I 
ought to be made to pay it back, or should all the 
employes be taxed?" To this question I got no 
answer. There isn't any answer. 

In all this confusion of mind, this whirlwind of 
ideas and theories, are there no Russians who can 
think clearly? Are there no brave and courageous 
people left in Russia? None who realize the ruin 
and desolation which is being prepared for them? 
There are. Russia has its submerged minority of 
thinkers. It has at least two fighting elements which 
are ready to die to restore peace, order and bright 
honor to their distracted land. These two elements 
are the Cossacks and the women. 



CHAPTER VI 



THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN 

The women soldiers of Russia, the most amazing 
development of the revolution, if not of the world 
war itself, I am disposed to believe, will, with the Cos- 
sacks, prove to be the element needed to lead, if it 
can be led, the disorganized and demoralized Rus- 
sian army back to its duty on the firing line. It was 
with the object, the hope, of leading them back that 
the women took up arms. Whatever else you may 
have heard about them this is the truth. I know 
those women soldiers very well. I know them in 
three regiments, one in Moscow and two in Petro- 
grad, and I went with one regiment as near to the 
fighting line as I was permitted. I traveled from 
Petrograd to a military position "somewhere in Po- 
land" with the famous Botchkareva Battalion of 
Death. I left Petrograd in the troop train with the 
women. I marched with them when they left the 
train. I lived with them for nine days in their bar- 
rack, around which thousands of men soldiers were 
encamped. I shared Botchkareva's soup and kasha, 
and drank hot tea out of her other tin cup. I slept 
beside her on the plank bed. I saw her and her 
women off to the firing line, and after the battle into 
which they led reluctant men, I sat beside their hos- 
pital beds and heard their own stories of the fight. 

50 



THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN 



5i 



I want to say right here that a country that can pro- 
duce such women cannot possibly be crushed forever. 
It may take time for it to recover its present debauch 
of anarchism, but recover it surely will. And when 
it does it will know how to honor the women who 
went out to fight when the men ran home. 

The Battalion of Death is not the name of one 
regiment, nor is it used exclusively to designate the 
women's battalions. It is a sort of order which has 
spread through many regiments since the demorali- 
zation began, and signifies that its members are loyal 
and mean to fight to the death for Russia. Some- 
times an entire regiment assumes the red and black 
ribbon arrowhead which, sewed on the right sleeve 
of the blouse, marks the order. Regiments have 
been made up of volunteers who are ready to wear 
the insignia. Such a regiment is the Battalion of 
Death commanded by Mareea Botchkareva (the 
spelling is phonetic), the extraordinary peasant 
woman who has risen to be a commissioned officer in 
the Russian army. 

Botchkareva comes from a village near the Siber- 
ian border and is, I should judge, about thirty years 
old. She was one of a large family of children, and 
the family was very poor. They had a harder time 
than ever after the father returned from the Japa- 
nese war minus one foot, but that did not prevent 
their number from increasing, and merely made the 
lot of Mareea, the oldest girl, a little more miser- 
able. She married young, fortunately a man with 
whom she was very happy. He was the village 
butcher and she helped him in the shop, as they had 
no children. When the war broke out in July, 19 14, 



52 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



Mareea's husband marched away with the rest of 
the quota from their village, and she never saw 
him again. He was killed in one of the first battles 
of the war, and the only time I ever saw Botch- 
kareva break down was when she told me how she 
waited long months for the letter he had promised 
to write her, and how at last a wounded comrade 
hobbled back to the village and told her that the 
letter would never come. He was dead — out there 
somewhere — and they had not even notified her. 

"The soldiers have it hard," she said, when her 
brief storm of tears was over, "but not so hard as 
the women at home. The soldier has a gun to fight 
death with. The women have nothing." 

For months Mareea Botchkareva watched the 
sufferings of the women and children of her village 
grow worse and worse. Winter killed some of 
them, winter and an unwonted scarcity of food. 
Typhus came along and killed more. The village 
forgot that it had ever danced and sung and was 
happy. Every family was in mourning for its dead. 
Mareea decided that she could not endure it to sit 
in her empty hut and wait for death. She would go 
out and meet it in the easier fashion permitted to 
men. That was the way, she explained to me, she 
joined the regiment of Siberian troops encamped 
near the village. The men did not want her, but 
she sought and got permission, and when the regi- 
ment went to the front she went along too. 

She fought in campaigns on several fronts, earned 
medals and finally the coveted cross of St. George 
for valor under fire. She was three times wounded, 
the last time in the autumn of 191 6, so badly that 



THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN 



53 



she lay in hospital for four months. She got back 
to her regiment, where she was now popular, and I 
imagine something of a leader, just before the revo- 
lution of February, 191 7. 

Botchkareva was an ardent revolutionist, and her 
regiment was one of the first to go over to the peo- 
ple's side. Her consternation and despair were 
great when, shortly after the emancipation from 
czardom, great masses of the people, and especially 
the soldiers at the front, began to demonstrate by 
riots and desertions how little they were ready for 
freedom. The men of her regiment deserted in 
numbers, and she went to members of the Duma 
who were going up and down the front trying to 
stay the tide, and said to them: "Give me leave to 
raise a regiment of women. We will go wherever 
men refuse to go. We will fight when they run. 
The women will lead the men back to the trenches." 
This is the history of Botchkareva's Battalion of 
Death, or rather of how it came to be organized. 
The Russian war ministry gave her leave to recruit 
the women, gave her a barrack in a former school 
building, and promised her equipment and a place at 
the front. Many women in Petrograd, women of 
wealth and social position, took fire with the idea, 
raised money for the regiment, helped in the re- 
cruiting, some of them joining. 

In an odd copy of an American newspaper that 
reached me in Russia I read a paragraph stating 
that the schoolgirls of Petrograd were forming a 
regiment under a man named Butchkareff, a lieu- 
tenant in the army. I don't know who sent out that 
piece of news, but it lacked most of the facts. The 



54 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

women soldiers are not schoolgirls, and Botchka- 
reva's battalion has no men officers. Three drill ser- 
geants, St. George cross men all of them, did assist 
in the training of the battalion while it remained in 
Petrograd. Other men drilled it behind the lines, 
but Botchkareva, and another remarkable woman, 
Marie Skridlova, her adjutant, commanded and led 
it in battle. 

Marie Skridlova is the daughter of Admiral 
Skridloff, one of the most distinguished men of the 
Russian navy. She is about twenty, very attractive 
if not actually beautiful, and is an accomplished mu- 
sician. Her life up to the outbreak of the war was 
that of an ordinary girl of the Russian aristocracy. 
She was educated abroad, taught several languages, 
and expected to have a career no more exciting or 
adventurous than that of any other woman of her 
class. When the war broke out she went into the 
Red Cross, took the nurses' training and served in- 
hospitals both at the front and in Petrograd. Then 
came the revolution. She was working in a marine 
hospital in the capital. She saw many of the hor- 
rors of those February days. She saw her own 
father set upon by soldiers in the streets, and rescued 
from death only because some of his own marines 
who loved him insisted that this one officer was not 
to be killed. 

Into the ward of the hospital where she was sta- 
tioned there was borne an old general, desperately 
wounded by a street mob. He had to be operated 
on at once to save his life, and as he was carried 
from the operating room to a private ward the men 
in the beds sat up and yelled, "Kill him! Kill 



THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN 



55 



him I" It is unlikely that they knew who he was, but 
it was death to all officers in those days of madness 
and frenzy. Half unconscious from loss of blood, 
still under the spell of the ether, the old man clung 
to his nurse as a child to his mother. "You won't 
let them kill me, will you?" he murmured. And 
Mile. Skridlova assured him that she would take 
care of him, that he was safe. 

The door opened and a white faced doctor rushed 
into the room. "Sister," he gasped, "go for that 
medicine — go quickly." Not comprehending she 
asked, "What medicine?" But he only pushed her 
towards the door. "Go, go !" he repeated. 

She left the room, and then she saw and under- 
stood. Down the corridor a mob was streaming, a 
wild, unkempt, blood-thirsty mob, the sweepings of 
the streets and barracks. Quickly she threw herself 
across the door of the old general's room. "Get 
back," she commanded. "The man in that room is 
old and wounded and helpless. He is in my care, 
and if you harm him it must be over my body." 

Incredible as it seems this girl of twenty was able 
for forty minutes to hold the mob at bay. When 
guns were pointed at her she told the men to fire 
through the red cross that covered her heart. They 
did not shoot, but some of the most brutal struck 
her down, and then held her helpless while others 
rushed into the room and hacked and beat the old 
man to death. When the nurse fought her way to 
his side he was breathing his last. She had time to 
whisper a prayer, and to make the sign of the cross 
above his glazing eyes. Then she went home, took 
off her Red Cross uniform, and said to her father: 



56 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



"Women have something more to do for Russia 
than binding men's wounds." 

When Botchkareva's Battalion of Death was 
formed Marie Skridlova determined to join it. Ad- 
miral Skridloff, veteran of two wars, iron old patriot, 
went with her to the women's barracks and with his 
own hand enrolled her in the Russian army service. 
In the regiment of which this girl was adjutant I 
found six Red Cross nurses who were through with 
nursing and had gone out to die for their unhappy 
country. There was a woman doctor who had seen 
service in base hospitals. There were clerks and 
office women, factory girls, servants, farm women. 
Ten women had fought in men's regiments. Every 
woman had her own story. I did not hear them all, 
but I heard many, each one a simple chronicle of suf- 
fering or bereavement, or shame over Russia's plight. 

There was one girl of nineteen, a Cossack, a 
pretty, dark-eyed young thing, left absolutely adrift 
after the death in battle of her father and two broth- 
ers, and the still more tragic death of her mother 
when the Germans shelled the hospital where she 
was nursing. To her a place in Botchkareva's regi- 
ment and a gun with which to defend herself spelled 
safety. 

"What was there left for me?" sighed a big 
Esthonian woman, showing me a photograph she 
wore constantly on her heart. It was a photograph 
of a lovely child of five years. "He died of want," 
said the woman briefly. "His father is a prisoner 
somewhere in Austria." 

There was a Japanese girl in the regiment, and 
when I asked her her reason for joining she smiled, 



THE WOMAN WITH THE GUN 57 



and in the evenly polite tone that marks her race, 
replied: "There were so many reasons that I pre- 
fer not to tell any of them." One twilight I came on 
this girl sitting outside with the little Polish Jewess 
with whom she bunked. The two sat perfectly mo- 
tionless on a fallen tree, watching a group of sol- 
diers gathered around a fire. In their silent gaze I 
read a malevolence, a reminiscence so full of concen- 
trated loathing that I turned away with a shudder. 
I never asked another woman her reason for joining 
the regiment. I was afraid it might be more per- 
sonal than patriotic. 

I do not believe, however, that this was the case 
with the majority. Mostly the women were in 
arms because they feared and dreaded the further 
demoralization of the troops, and they believed fer- 
vently that they could rally their men to fight. 
"Our men," they said, "are suffering from a sickness 
of the soul. It is our duty to lead them back to 
health." Every woman in the regiment had seen 
war face to face, had suffered bitterly through war, 
and finally had seen their men fail in the fight. They 
had beheld their men desert in time of war, the most 
dishonorable thing men can do, and they said, "Well 
then, there is nothing left except for us to go in their 
places." 

Did the world ever witness a more sublime hero- 
ism than that? Women, in the long years which 
history has recorded, have done everything for men 
that they were called upon to do. It remained for 
Russian men, in the twentieth century, to call upon 
women to fight and die for them. And the women 
did it. 



CHAPTER VII 



TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCH KAREVA 

Women of all ranks rushed to enlist in the Botch- 
kareva battalion. There were many peasant women, 
factory workers, servants and also a number of 
women of education and social prominence. Six 
Red Cross nurses were among the number, one doc- 
tor, a lawyer, several clerks and stenographers and 
a few like Marie Skridlova who had never done any 
except war work. If the working women predom- 
inated I believe it was because they were the stronger 
physically. Botchkareva would accept only the stur- 
diest, and her soldiers, even when they were slight 
of figure, were all fine physical specimens. The 
women were outfitted and equipped exactly like the 
men soldiers. They wore the same kind of khaki 
trousers, loose-belted blouse and high peaked cap. 
They wore the same high boots, carried the same 
arms and the same camp equipment, including gas 
masks, trench spades and other paraphernalia. In 
spite of their tightly shaved heads they presented a 
very attractive appearance, like nice, clean, upstand- 
ing boys. They were very strictly drilled and dis- 
ciplined and there was no omission of saluting offi- 
cers in that regiment. 

The battalion left Petrograd for an unknown des- 



TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA 59 



tination on July 6 in our calendar. In the afternoon 
the women marched to the Kazan Cathedral, where 
a touching ceremony of farewell and blessing took 
place. A cold, fine rain was falling, but the great 
half circle before the cathedral, as well as the long 
curved colonnades, were filled with people. Thou- 
sands of women were there carrying flowers, and 
nurses moved through the crowds collecting money 
for the regiment. 

I passed a very uneasy day that July 6. I was 
afraid of what might happen to some of the women 
through the malignancy of the Bolsheviki, and I was 
mortally afraid that I was not going to be allowed to 
get on their troop train. I had made the usual ap- 
plication to the War Ministry to be allowed to visit 
the front, but I did not follow up the application 
with a personal visit, and therefore when I dropped 
in for a morning call I was dismayed to find the bar- 
rack in a turmoil, and to hear the exultant announce- 
ment, "We're going this evening at eight." 

It was an unseasonal day of rain, and I spent reck- 
less sums in droshky hire, rushing hither and yon in a 
fruitless effort to wring emergency permits from elu- 
sive officials who never in their lives had been called 
upon to do anything in a hurry, or even to keep con- 
ventional office hours. Needless to say I found no- 
body at all on duty where he should have been that 
day. Even at the American Embassy, where, empty- 
handed and discouraged, I wound up late in the af- 
ternoon, I found the entire staff absent in attendance 
on a visiting commission from home. The one help- 
ful person who happened to be at the Embassy was 
Arno Dosch-Fleurot of the New York World. "If 



6o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



I were you," he said, "I wouldn't worry about a per- 
mit. I'd just get on the train — if I could get on — 
and I'd stay until they put me off, or until I got 
where I wanted to go. Of course they may arrest 
you for a spy. In any other country they'd be pretty 
sure to. But in Russia you never can tell. Shepherd, 
of the United Press, once went all over the front 
with nothing to show but some worthless mining 
stock. Why not try it?" 

I said I would, and before eight that evening I 
was at the Warsaw Station, unwillingly participating 
in what might be called the regiment's first hostile 
engagement. For at least two thirds of the mob 
that filled the station were members of the Lenine 
faction of Bolsheviki, sent there to break up the 
orderly march of the women, and even if possible to 
prevent them from entraining at all. From the first 
these spy-led emissaries of the German Kaiser had 
sworn enmity to Botchkareva's battalion. Well 
knowing the moral effect of women taking the places 
of deserting soldiers in the trenches, the Lenineites 
had exhausted every effort to breed dissension in 
the ranks, and at the last moment they had stormed 
the station in the hope of creating an intolerable situ- 
ation. In the absence of anything like a police force 
they did succeed in making things painful and even a 
little dangerous for the soldiers and for the tearful 
mothers and sisters who had gathered to bid them 
good-by. But the women kept perfect discipline 
through it all, and slowly fought their way through 
the mob to the train platform. 

As for me, a mixture of indignation, healthy 
muscle and rare good luck carried me through and 



TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA 61 



landed me in a somewhat battered condition next to 
Adjutant Skridlova. "You got your permit," she 
exclaimed on seeing me. "I am so pleased. Stay 
close to me and I'll see you safely on." 

Mendaciously perhaps, I answered nothing at all, 
but stayed, and every time a perspiring train official 
grabbed me by the arm and told me to stand back 
Skridlova rescued me and informed the man that I 
had permission to go. At the very last I had a bad 
moment, for one especially inquisitive official asked 
to see the permission. This time it was the Nachal- 
nik, Botchkareva herself, who came to the rescue. 
Characteristically she wasted no words, but merely 
pushed the man aside, thrust me into her own com- 
partment and ordered me to lock the door. Within 
a few minutes she joined me, the train began to move 
and we were off. That was the end of my troubles, 
for no one afterwards questioned my right to be 
there. At the Adjutant's suggestion I parted with 
my New York hat and early in the journey substi- 
tuted the white linen coif of a Red Cross nurse. Thus 
attired I was accepted by all concerned as a part 
of the camp equipment. 

The troop train consisted of one second class and 
five fourth class carriages, the first one, except for 
one compartment reserved for officers, being practi- 
cally filled with camp and hospital supplies. In the 
other carriages, primitive affairs furnished with three 
tiers of wooden bunks, the rank and file of the regi- 
ment traveled. I had a place in the second class 
compartment with the Nachalnik, the Adjutant and 
the standard bearer, a big, silent peasant girl called 
Orlova. Our luxury consisted of cushioned shelves 



62 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



without bedding or blankets, which served as seats 
by day and beds by night. We had, of course, a 
little more privacy than the others, but that was all. 
As for food, we all fared alike, and we fared well, 
friends of the regiment having loaded the train 
with bread, butter, fruit, canned things, cakes, choco- 
late and other delicacies. Tea-making materials we 
had also, and plenty of sugar. So filled was our 
compartment with food, flowers, banners, guns, tea 
kettles and miscellaneous stuff that we moved about 
with difficulty and were forever apologizing folr 
walking on each other's feet. 

For two nights and the better part of two days 
we traveled southward through fields of wheat, bar- 
ley and potatoes, where women in bright red and 
blue smocks toiled among the ripening harvests. 
News of the train had gone down the line, and the 
first stage of our journey, through the white night, 
was one continued ovation. At every station crowds 
had gathered to cheer the women and to demand a 
sight of Botchkareva. It was largely a masculine 
crowd, soldiers mostly, goodnatured and laughing, 
but many women were there too, nurses, working 
girls, peasants. Occasionally one saw ladies in din- 
ner gowns escorted by officer friends. 

The farther we traveled from Petrograd, the 
point of contact in Russia with western civilization, 
the more apparent it grew that things were terribly 
wrong with the empire. More and more the 
changed character of the station crowds reminded 
us of the widespread disruption of the army. The 
men who met the train wore soldiers' uniforms but 
they had lost all of their upright, soldierly bearing. 



TO THE FRONT WITH BOTCHKAREVA 63 



They slouched like convicts, they were dirty and un- 
kempt, and their eyes were full of vacuous inso- 
lence. Absence of discipline and all restraint had 
robbed them of whatever manhood they had once 
possessed. The news of the women's battalion had 
drawn these men like a swarm of bees. They thrust 
their unshaven faces into the car windows, bawling 
the parrot phrases taught them by their German spy 
leaders. "Who fights for the damned capitalists? 
Who fights for English bloodsuckers? We don't 
fight." 

And the women, scorn flashing from their eyes, 
flung back: u That is the reason why we do. Go 
home, you cowards, and let women fight for Russia." 

Their last, flimsy thread of "peace" propaganda 
exhausted the men usually fell back on personal in- 
sults, but to these the women, following strict or- 
ders, made no reply. When the language became 
too coarse the women simply closed the windows. 
No actual violence was ever offered them. When 
they left the train for hot water or for tea, for more 
food or to buy newspapers, they walked so fear- 
lessly into the crowds that the men withdrew, sneer- 
ing and growling, but standing aside. 

There was something indescribably strange about 
going on a journey to a destination absolutely un- 
known, except to the one in command of the expe- 
dition. Above all it was strange to feel that you 
were seeing women voluntarily giving up the last 
shred of protection and security supposed to be due 
them. They were going to meet death, death in 
battle against a foreign foe, the first women in the 
world to volunteer for such an end. Yet every one 



64 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



was happy, and the only fear expressed was lest the 
battalion should not be sent at once to the trenches. 

As for me, when we arrived at our destination, 
some two miles from the barracks prepared for us, 
I had a moment of longing for the comparative 
safety of the trenches. For what looked to me like 
the whole Russian army had come out to meet the 
women's battalion, and was solidly massed on both 
sides of the railroad track as far as I could see. 

I looked at the Nachalnik calmly buckling on her 
sword and revolver. She had a confident little smile 
on her lips. "You may have to fight those men out 
there before you fight the Germans," I said. 

"We are ready to begin fighting any time," she 
replied. 

She was the first one out of the train, and the 
others rapidly followed her. 



CHAPTER VIII 



IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD 

The women's regiment did not have to fight its 
brothers in arms, however. The woman commander 
took care of that. She just walked into that mob 
of waiting soldiers and barked out a command in a 
voice I had never before heard her use. It re- 
minded me somewhat of that extra awful motor car 
siren that infuriates the pedestrian, but lifts him 
out of the road in one quick jump. Botchkareva's 
command was spoken in Russian, and a liberal trans- 
lation of it might read: "You get to hell out of 
here and let my regiment pass." 

It may not have been ladylike, but it had the 
proper effect on the Russian army, which promptly 
backed up on both sides of the road, leaving a clear 
lane between for the women. The women shoul- 
dered their heavy kits and under a broiling sun 
marched the two miles which lay between the rail- 
road and the camp. The Russian army followed the 
whole way, apparently deciding that the better part 
of valor was to laugh at the women, not to fight 
them. 

Botchkareva must also have decided that the first 
thing to be done was to give those men to understand 
that whether the regiment was funny or not it would 
have to be treated with respect. As soon as we 

65 



66 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



reached our barracks and disposed of the heavy 
loads, she made a little speech in which she said 
that here we were, and while we would be obliged 
to mingle with the men, relations would be kept 
formal. The men must be shown that the women 
were entitled to the same camp privileges as them- 
selves, and were no more to be molested or annoyed 
than any other soldiers. We had had a long, hot 
journey, she ended, and the first thing we were going 
to do was to go down to the river and have a nice 
swim. So with towels around their necks the 250 
women made gayly for the river. I trotted along on 
the commander's arm. At least a thousand men 
went along, too, but just before we reached the swim- 
ming pool under a railroad bridge, Botchkareva 
turned around and delivered another of those crisp 
little commands. The men stopped in their tracks 
as if she had thrown some kind of freezing gas at 
them, and we went on. 

It was a lovely swimming pool, clear and cold and 
fringed with sheltering willows. The women peeled 
off their clothes like boys and plunged in. As we 
dressed afterward I looked at them, heads shaved, 
ugly clothes, coarse boots, no concealments, not a 
single aid to beauty, but, in spite of it all, singularly 
attractive. Some of course were homely, primitive 
types. Purple and fine linen would not have im- 
proved them much. But some who would not have 
been especially pretty as girls were almost handsome 
as boys. A few were strikingly beautiful in spite 
of their shaved heads. You observed that they had 
good skulls, nice ears, fine eyes, strong characters, 
whereas in ordinary clothes they might have ap- 



IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD 67 



peared as pleasingly commonplace as the girl on 
the magazine cover. 

Cool and refreshed, the battalion marched back 
to the barracks, which consisted of two long, hastily 
constructed wooden buildings, exactly like hundreds 
of others on all sides about as far as the eye could 
reach. Some of the buildings were half under- 
ground, for warmth in winter, and must have been 
rather stuffy. Our buildings were well ventilated 
with many dormer windows in the sharply slanting 
roof, and they were new and clean and free from 
the insects which in secret I had been dreading. In- 
side was nothing at all except two long wooden plat- 
forms running the length of the building, about 
ninety feet. They were very roughly planed and 
full of bumps and knot holes, but they were the 
only beds provided by a step-motherly government. 
Here the women dumped their heavy loads, their 
guns, ammunition belts, gas masks, dog tents, trench 
spades, food pails and other paraphernalia. Here 
they unrolled their big overcoats for blankets, and 
here for the next week, all of us, officers, soldiers 
and war correspondent, ate, slept and lived. Two 
hundred and fifty women in the midst of an army 
of men. Behind us a government too engrossed in 
fighting for its own existence to concern itself about 
the safety of any group of women. Before us the 
muttering guns of the German foe. Between us 
and all that women have ever been taught to fear, 
a flimsy wooden door. But sleeplessly guarding that 
door a woman with a gun. 

In that first midnight in camp I woke on my plank 
bed to hear the shuffling of men's feet on the thresh- 



68 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



old, a loud knock at the door, and from our sen- 
try a sharp challenge: "Who goes there?" 

"We want to come in," said a man's voice in- 
gratiatingly. 

"No one can come in at this hour," answered the 
sentry. "Who are you and what do you want?" 

The man's answer was brutally to the point. 
"Aren't there girls here?" he demanded. 

"There are no girls here," was the instant reply. 
"Only soldiers are here." 

An angry fist crashed against the thin wood, to be 
answered by the swift click of a rifle barrel on the 
other side. "Unless you leave at once we shall fire 
on you," said the sentry in a voice of portentous 
calm. 

Down the long plank platform I heard a succes- 
sion of low chuckles, and a sleepy comment or two 
which the retreating men outside would not have 
found complimentary. That midnight encounter 
served the excellent purpose of finally establishing 
the status of the regiment in camp. From that time 
on we lived unmolested. We stood in line with the 
men at the cookhouse for our daily rations of black 
bread, soup and kasha, a sort of porridge made of 
buckwheat. We performed our simple morning 
toilets in the open; we washed our clothes in im- 
provised washtubs behind the barracks; we strolled 
about between drills. The men followed us around 
from morning until night. They watched us open 
eyed, hung in curious groups before the doors. A 
few were openly friendly, and beyond some dis- 
paraging remarks regarding our personal appear- 
ance none were hostile. 



IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD 69 



The day after we arrived, Monday, it rained. It 
poured. The camp became a swamp. The women 
stayed in their barrack, drilling as best they could 
in the narrow aisles. Sitting on the edge of their 
plank beds, the only place there was to sit, they 
listened with deep attention while under-officers read 
aloud the army code and regulations. In the morn- 
ing a group of nurses from a hospital train in the 
neighborhood came to call, and in the afternoon half 
a dozen officers came from the stavka, two miles 
away. The commander, a charming man, seemed 
astonished and deeply impressed with the regiment 
standing at attention to greet him. . 

"It is beautiful," he said repeatedly, and he was 
good enough to say to me, "How wonderful for an 
American woman to be with them. Thank you for 
coming." 

Tuesday it cleared and the battalion had its first 
open field drills. The rest of the Russian army 
stood around and pretended to be vastly amused. 
Whenever a woman made a mistake in the manual, 
and better still, when she fell down while charging, 
or splashed into a mud puddle on a run, the men 
laughed loudly. Some of that laughter, I feel pretty 
certain, hid hurt pride, for every decent soldier I 
talked to expressed his sorrow and humiliation that 
the women had felt the necessity of enlisting. Quite 
a number of men in that camp had been in America 
and of course spoke English. They said, "Say, sis- 
ter, what do you suppose they think about this back 
in Illinois?" One man said, "Sister," (I still wore 
the nurse's coif, having no other headgear) "back 
home in the States they used to say women oughtn't 



70 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



to vote because they couldn't fight. I'll bet these 
women can fight." 

The officers in and around that army position were 
evidently of the same opinion. They came to the 
drill field every day to inspect and criticize the work, 
and they sent their best drill sergeants to instruct 
the women, who worked hard and learned quickly. 
One day the commander of the Tenth army, whose 
Russian name is too much for my memory at this 
distance, came over with his whole staff, a brilliant 
sight. The commander was plainly delighted, and 
shook hands with a great many of the women. He 
even went out of his way to shake hands with the 
American. Kerensky was in the neighborhood one 
day, but he did not visit us. The Nachalnik saw him 
at staff headquarters and he sent kind messages, 
promising the women that they should be sent to 
the front as soon as they were ready. 

The impatience of those women to go forward, 
to get into action, was constant. They fretted and 
quarreled during the frequent rainy spells which kept 
them housebound, and were really happy only when 
something happened to promise an early start. One 
day it was the arrival of 250 pairs of new boots, 
great clumsy things which it would have crippled me 
to wear, and in fact all the women who could afford 
it had boots made to order. Another day it was 
the appearance of a camp cooking outfit especially 
for the battalion. Four good horses were attached 
to the outfit, and the country girls hailed them with 
delight as something to pet and fuss over. 

The women spent much time cleaning and learning 
their guns. They seemed to love their firearms, one 



IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD 71 



girl always alluding to her rifle as "my sweetheart." 

"How can you love a gun?" I asked her. 

"I love anything that brings death to the Ger- 
mans," she answered grimly. This girl, a highly 
educated, wellbred young woman, was in Germany 
when the war broke out. She was arrested and 
charged with espionage, a charge which, for all I 
know, may have been true. It was not proved, of 
course, or she would have been shot. On the mere 
suspicion, however, she was kept in prison for a 
year and must have suffered pretty severely. She 
looked forward to the coming fight with keen zest. 
I asked her one day what she would do if she was 
taken prisoner again. She pulled from under her 
blouse a slender gold chain on the end of which was 
a capsule in a chamois bag. "I shall never be taken 
prisoner," she said. "None of us will." 

From Thursday on the weather improved and 
the regiment worked hard in the field. I had felt 
the strain of confinement in barracks, and when I 
was not watching the drill I was taking long walks 
down a highway over which went a constant proces- 
sion of troops and camp supply wagons, moving on 
and on, nearer the horizon, from which came fre- 
quent low mutterings like distant thunder, but which 
were heavy gunfire. Sometimes I walked as far as 
a little settlement which the Nachalnik told me was 
not unlike the village she found so unbearable after 
her husband left it. The village consisted of two 
rows of log or roughly timbered cottages along a 
winding, muddy road. Green moss grew on the 
thatched roofs, and the whole place had a forlorn, 
neglected look, but surrounding each cottage was a 



72 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



carefully tended garden with beets, cabbages, onions, 
potatoes, and sunflowers grown for the seeds, which 
are the Russian substitute for chewing gum. Often 
the cottages had poppies growing in the rows of 
vegetables, the bright blooms giving brilliance to the 
somber and lonely landscape. 

Half a dozen miles on the other side of the railroad 
was another and a larger village, equally dismal, 
but furnished with a church, a wayside shrine, small 
shops and other improvements. My special friend 
the Adjutant and I drove over there one day after 
supplies. We bought chocolate, nuts, sardines and 
biscuits to relieve the deadly monotony of our daily 
black bread, soup and kasha. The regiment bought 
some supplies at little market stalls near the station. 
Here one bought butter, sausages reeking with gar- 
lic, tinned fish and doubtful eggs. At an officers' 
store in the vicinity Botchkareva spent some of the 
money donated in Petrograd for tea and sugar when 
they were needed, and for a kind of white bread or 
biscuits. They were hard and shaped like old-fash- 
ioned doughnuts, with a hole in the middle through 
which a string was run. A yard or two of this bread 
went well with good butter and hot, fragrant tea. 
As far as food was concerned I was better off in 
the camp than I was a little later in Petrograd. 
There was even a fairly good hot meal to be had 
at the station when we chose to go there, which we 
did several times. But no amount of good food 
would have kept our regiment happy in camp very 
long. The women fretted and chafed and demand- 
ed to know why they were kept in that hole. The 
Nachalnik coaxed and scolded them along, and 



IN CAMP AND BATTLEFIELD 



Skridlova, who was easily the most popular person 
in camp, reminded them that it took six months to 
train ordinary soldiers and that they were being es- 
pecially favored by having the time shortened. 

Those women went into battle after less than two 
months' training, as it turned out, for the evening 
of the ninth day the Nachalnik came back from 
headquarters with orders to march the next morn- 
ing at five. What an uproar followed! Cheers, 
laughter, singing. You would have thought they 
were going anywhere except to a battlefield where 
death waited for some and cruel suffering for many. 
I wanted to go with them, and would have insisted 
on going had I known that they were so soon to 
fight. But orders were merely to advance for fur- 
ther drill under gunfire. I would have been fright- 
fully in the way in the new position, which had no 
barracks, but only dog tents, just enough to go 
around. Nothing on earth except the knowledge 
that I would be depriving some one of those brave 
women from the comfort of a dry and sheltered 
bed persuaded me to leave them. 

Five days later in Petrograd I read in the dis- 
patches that they had been sent almost directly into 
action, leading men who had previously refused to 
advance, and turning a defeat into a victory; a small 
one to be sure, but Russia was thankful for even small 
victories those days. A short note from Skridlova 
prepared me for the story of losses which I knew was 
coming. She wrote in French, which she knows bet- 
ter than English, "You have heard already per- 
haps that we have been in action. I do not know 
yet how many were killed or have died of wounds, 



74 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



but two of those you knew well were killed. Cath- 
erine and Olga, who you remember had won three 
medals of St. George. Eighteen girls are wounded 
badly, Nina among them." Nina was the girl who 
called her gun "sweetheart," and who had been a 
prisoner in Germany. Skridlova was badly contused 
in the head, shoulders and knees, but she re- 
mained in command of the remnant of the battalion 
because the Nachalnik, Botchkareva, had suffered so 
severely from shell shock that she had to be sent 
to a hospital in Petrograd. She was nearly deaf 
when I saw her, and her heart was badly affected. 

"It was a good fight," she whispered, smiling 
from her pillow. "Not a woman faltered, not one. 
The Russian men hid in a little wood while the offi- 
cers swore at them and begged them to advance. 
Then they sent us forward, and we called to the 
men that we would lead them if they would only fol- 
low. Some of them said they would follow, and 
we went forward on a run, still shouting to the men. 
About two-thirds of them went with us, and we eas- 
ily put the Germans to flight. We killed a lot of 
Germans and took almost a hundred prisoners, in-* 
eluding two officers." In another hospital I found 
more than twenty of the battalion, some slightly 
and others seriously wounded. The worst cases 
were kept in base hospitals, near the battle front, 
and I never saw Nina again. 



CHAPTER IX 



AMAZONS IN TRAINING 

If the first battle of the first women soldiers in 
the world had been fought on American soil imag- 
ine what the newspapers would have made of the 
story. Especially if the women had gone into bat- 
tle with the object of rallying a demoralized Amer- 
ican army, and had succeeded in their object. And 
this is all the space Botchkareva's victorious battal- 
ion was accorded in Novoe Vremya, one of the best 
newspapers in Russia. After describing briefly the 
engagement on the Smorgon-Krevo front, in which 
prisoners, guns and ammunition were taken, the 
account proceeded: "The women's battalion made 
a counter attack, replacing deserters who ran away. 
This battalion captured almost a hundred prison- 
ers including two officers. Botchkareva and Skrid- 
lova are wounded, the latter receiving contusions 
and shock from the explosion of a big shell. The 
battalion suffered some losses, but has won historic 
fame for the name of women. The best soldiers 
looked with consideration and esteem on their new 
fighting comrades, but the deserters were not 
touched by their example, and in this respect the 
aim was not reached. We must take care of these 
dear forces, and not give too much consideration to 
new formations of the kind." 

75 



76 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

If the press of Russia had been wise, the fact 
that some of the slackers in the army were not 
touched by the women's bravery would have been 
made less conspicuous than the more important fact 
that many soldiers were touched by it, and that the 
Russian army was thereby enabled to win a victory. 
Instead of discouraging new formations, the press 
should have called for more and more regiments of 
women to lead the men. They should have kept 
it up until people got so excited over the tragedy 
of women being torn to pieces by German shot and 
shrapnel that they would have risen in wrath, taken 
hold of their army and their government, and cre- 
ated conditions which would relieve women from 
the dreadful necessity of fighting. 

It could have been done, the people were ready 
for it. They felt the tragedy. At a memorial serv- 
ice for the dead women, held in Kazan Cathedral 
the Sunday after the battle, the presiding priest said: 
"This is a terrible, and yet a glorious hour for Rus- 
sia. Sad it is, and terrible beyond expression that 
men have allowed women to die in their places for 
our unhappy country. But glorious it will ever be 
that Russian women have been ready and willing to 
do it." 

After the service a Bolshevik soldier, standing 
in front of the cathedral, tried to turn the sympa- 
thies of the crowd by making insulting remarks 
about the dead women. He did not have time to 
say much before a group of working women, with 
howls of rage, rushed him, and I believe would have 
killed him if his friends had not got him away. 

Of the women left alive but wounded, thirty were 



AMAZONS IN TRAINING 77 



brought to a hospital not far from the Nikolai sta- 
tion, Petrograd, and there I saw them. When I 
went into the first hospital ward a wounded girl 
sat up in bed and, smiling like the sun, held out to 
me a German officer's helmet, her prize of battle. 
She had killed him — that was her duty — and had 
taken his helmet as a man would have done. But 
when she told me that Orlova, big, dull, kind, un- 
selfish Orlova, loved by everybody, was among the 
killed, she broke down and wept as any woman 
would have done. 

From this girl and the others I learned that Botch- 
kareva had spoken the exact truth when she said 
that no woman had faltered or shown fear. "We 
all expected to die, I think," one girl said. "I know 
that I did. I said over the prayers for the dying 
while I was dressing that morning. We all prayed 
and kissed our holy pictures, and thought sadly 
about the ones at home. But we were not afraid. 
We were stationed between two little woods. They 
were full of men, some who openly refused to go 
forward, some who hesitated and didn't quite know 
what they ought to do. We shouted at them, the 
commander shouted at them, called them cowards, 
traitors, everything we could think of. Then the 
commander called out: 'Come on, brothers, we'll 
go first if you'll only follow.' 

" 'All right then,' some of them called back, and 
we ran forward as fast as we could, following Botch- 
kareva. She was wonderful, and Skridlova was 
wonderful too. We would have followed them any- 
where." 



78 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

"Did you really capture a hundred Germans?" I 
asked. 

"I don't believe we did it all by ourselves, " was 
the modest reply. "After we got into the fighting 
the men and the women were side by side. We 
fought together and we won the battle together." 

Every one of those wounded women soldiers 
wanted to go back to the front line. If fighting 
and dying were the price of Russia's freedom, they 
wanted to fight and fight again. If they could rally 
unwilling men to fight, they wanted nothing in the 
world except more chances to do it. Wounds were 
nothing, death was nothing in the scale of Russia's 
honor or dishonor. Then too, and this is a strange 
commentary on women's "protected" position in life, 
the women soldiers said that fighting was not the 
most difficult or the most disagreeable work they 
had ever done. They said it was less arduous if a 
little more dangerous than working in a harvest 
field or a factory. 

This point of view I have heard expressed by 
other Russian women soldiers, those who have 
fought in men's regiments. There are many such 
women; I have met and talked with some of them. 
One girl I saw in a hospital, a bullet in her side 
and a broken hand in a plaster cast, assured me 
that fighting was the most congenial work she had 
ever done. This girl had gone to Petrograd from 
Riga to join Botchkareva's battalion, but for some 
reason she had not been accepted. She met a young 
marine who told her of a new Battalion of Death 
which was being formed out of the remnants of 
several old regiments and of a number of marines. 



AMAZONS IN TRAINING 79 



"Why not join us?" he asked. "We already have 
four girl comrades." So she joined. 

We were alone except for the interpreter, and 
I took occasion to ask this girl minutely how it fared 
with women who joined men's regiments. Were 
the women treated with respect, let alone? How 
did they manage about their physical needs ? Where 
did they bathe and change their clothes? Did not 
the officers object to their presence in the barracks? 
At first, my young soldier admitted, the men did 
not treat the women with respect, did not let them 
alone. She was obliged to give the men some se- 
vere lessons. But after a while they learned. They 
were considerate in certain respects, and arranged 
for the girls to have some privacy. Of course one 
lost foolish mock modesty when in camp. 

The officers did not object to their enlisting, but 
were inclined to treat them with a lofty indifference. 
The men too seemed to assume that the girls could 
not endure the real hardships of war when they 
came. "The first thing we had to do in camp was 
to make a quick march of twelve versts. 'Of course 
the girls can't walk that far,' the men said, 'they 
can ride on the cook wagons.' But we said, 'Not 
much we don't ride on the cook wagons. We didn't 
come here to watch you do things. We came to be 
soldiers like yourselves. ' So they said, 'Oh, very 
well! Harasho! March if you like.' And we did. 
And when we got back to camp, it was so funny; 
sailors are not much used to walking, you know, 
and those men were completely tired out, exhausted. 
They lay around in their bunks and groaned and 
called on everybody to look at their feet and their 



8o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



blisters, while we weren't tired at all. Why, any of 
us had walked as far and worked as hard in one 
day in the kitchen or the harvest field. So we 
laughed at the men and said, 'You're just a lot of old 
women. Look at us. We could do it all over again 
and not complain.' After that I can tell you they 
didn't patronize us quite such a lot." 

When the regiment got into camp near the 
trenches and the men were given the regulation uni- 
form of the army, the officers decreed that the girls' 
soldiering should come to an end. The real business 
of fighting was about to begin and women were not 
wanted. They could be sanitaries, said the com- 
mander. So they went back to women's clothes and 
women's historic job of waiting on men. This girl, 
however, objected, and finally confided to one of her 
men friends that the sanitary's work was too dis- 
tasteful for her to endure longer. "Why should I 
be obliged to patch up wounds?" she asked. "It is 
much easier to make them." The soldier found 
some regimentals for her and she went out and 
fought in a skirmish line. When the commander 
heard of it he was terribly angry and to frighten 
her he put her on sentry duty in an exposed post. 
"He thought he'd cure me of my taste for fighting," 
she chuckled, "but I wasn't frightened a bit, and so 
he said, 'Well, be a soldier if you are so bent on it. 
We need soldiers.' And so, I fought." 

She described her first and only battle where she 
helped storm several lines of trenches and was one 
of thirty-seven survivors out of a thousand in her 
regiment who took part in the engagement. Her 
wounds, she said, did not hurt much at the time, but 



AMAZONS IN TRAINING 8i 



she was bleeding pretty badly and thought she ought 
to get to the hospital. 

"Just then I saw our captain, and he was badly 
wounded, almost unconscious in fact, and I had to 
get him to the rear on my back. It was all that I 
could do, for about that time I felt that I was grow- 
ing weak and would soon have to sit down. I man- 
aged to get him as far as the first line of Red Cross 
men, and then I went under. I had been hit in the 
side by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel and I was 
pretty sick for a while. By and by I felt better and 
somehow got back to the rear. The first thing I 
saw was one of our men who was weeping with his 
head in his hands. 'What's wrong ?' I asked, and 
when he looked up and saw me he gave a yell. 'They 
said you had been killed,' he shouted. And he be- 
gan to dance a hornpipe. Poor chap, he had been 
wounded too and before he had danced more than 
a few steps he began to bleed and fell over in a 
faint." 

The ambulances were pretty full, so this plucky 
young creature thought she could walk the three or 
four versts to the hospital. She had to give up be- 
fore long and a captain of another regiment, himself 
wounded, took her into his cart or whatever convey- 
ance he had, and carried her to the hospital. "Our 
captain was there," she finished, "quite out of his 
head with pain. He kept saying, 'Don't let that 
girl go back to the field. Don't let her fight again. 
She is too young.' He did not know then that I had 
carried him off on my back, and me wounded too." 

A great many women who had seen service in 
men's regiments were leaving them and joining one 



82 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



or another of the women's regiments which were 
forming all over Russia about that time. The larg- 
est of these regiments was being trained for action in 
Moscow. There were about two thousand women 
in this battalion, which was formed and recruited 
by a women's committee, "The Society of Russian 
Women to Help the Country." Among the women 
was Madame Morosova, before the war prominent 
socially, but since the war almost entirely occupied 
with relief work. She was a very gay and laughter- 
loving person, but she had fed and clothed and 
helped on their way thousands of refugees. She 
had turned her house into a maternity hospital at 
times, and she had given large sums of money for 
the relief of women and children. Finally the 
women soldiers appealed to her as the most impor- 
tant work to be assisted and her whole energies 
last summer were devoted to the battalion. Prin- 
cess Kropotkin, a relative of the celebrated Prince 
Pierre Kropotkin, was another member of the so- 
ciety. She had a Red Cross hospital until the army 
desertions began, and then she closed the hospital 
and turned to recruiting women. Mme. Popova, 
vice-president of the society, is one more untiring 
worker. In August she obtained Kerensky's consent 
to go to Tomsk, her old home, and organize a bat- 
talion there. 

The Moscow regiment was being drilled by a 
colonel and half a dozen younger officers, all of 
whom seemed immensely proud of their command. 
Twenty picked women of the regiment were going 
daily to the officers' school and when ready were to 
be given commissions in the regular army. 



AMAZONS IN TRAINING 83 



In Petrograd a regiment of 1,500 women was 
almost ready for the trenches when I saw them last 
in August. They too were to be officered by women, 
two score being a daily attendance at a military 
school. On August 20 I saw these 1,500 women 
march out of their barrack in the old Engineers' 
Palace, to go into camp preparatory to going to the 
front. This palace was once the home of the mad 
Emperor Paul, son of Catherine the Great. He was 
assassinated there and his restless ghost is supposed 
to haunt the gusty corridors. I asked Captain Lus- 
koff, commander of the regiment, if he had found 
out what the Emperor Paul thought of the women 
soldiers, and he laughed and promised to report 
later on that point. 

It was not intended to raise many regiments of 
women, I was told. The intention was to enlist and 
train to the highest point of efficiency between ten 
and twenty thousand women, and to distribute the 
regiments over the various front lines to inspire and 
stimulate the disorganized army. They would lead 
the men in battle when necessary, as Botchkareva's 
brave band led them, and they would appear as a 
sign and symbol that the women of the country were 
not willing that the revolution, which generations of 
Russian men and women have died for, and have 
endured in the snows of Siberia sufferings worse 
than death, should end in chaos and national disin- 
tegration. 



CHAPTER X 



THE HOMING EXILES — TWO KINDS 

In a great, bare room, furnished with rows of 
narrow cots like a hospital, but with none of the 
crisp whiteness of the hospital, nor any of its prom- 
ise of relief and restoration, a young man, propped 
with pillows, played on a concertina. He was white, 
emaciated, near the end of his young life. His eyes 
were like banked fires. He sat up in bed and in 
the intervals of coughing made the most wonderful 
music on that concertina, much more wonderful than 
I had ever dreamed the humble instrument could 
produce. The man was a true musician, and he 
had had many years of practice on his concertina, 
for it had been the one friend and solace of a soli- 
tary confinement which lasted nearly a dozen years. 
All around him in that bare room men lay in bed 
and listened to him. Some, however, were asleep. 
Even music could not break their weary rest. All 
were sick. Some were as near death as was the 
musician. Siberia had done its work with them. 
They had come home to die. 

On a soap box, or its equivalent on a corner of 
the Nevski Prospect near the Alexander Theater, 
another young man stood and poured out a passion- 
ate speech to the crowd of soldiers, workmen and 
workwomen and idle boys who had paused to listen. 

8 4 



THE HOMING EXILES— TWO KINDS 85 

The man was about thirty years old, and his clothes, 
it was plain to see, had never been purchased in 
Russia. They were American clothes of fair qual- 
ity, and of that stylish cut possible to buy for twen- 
ty-five dollars in almost any department store. He 
wore a derby hat, tipped back on his head, a soft 
collar and a flowing tie. He talked rapidly and with 
many gestures, and the crowd listened with rapt in- 
terest to his speech. I, too, stopped to listen. "What 
is he saying?" I asked my interpreter. 

"I don't like to tell you," she replied. 

I insisted, and this is an almost literal transla- 
tion of what that man said, on that Petrograd street 
corner, on an August day, 19 17 : 

"You people over here in Russia don't want to 
make a mistake of setting up the kind of a republic, 
of the kind of phony democracy like what they've 
got in the United States. I lived in the United 
States for ten years, and you take it from me, it's 
the worst government in the world. They have a 
president who is worse than the Czar. The police 
are worse than Cossacks. The capitalist class is on 
top there just like they were in the old days in Rus- 
sia. The working class is fighting them, and they 
are going to win. We are going to put the capital- 
ists out just like you put them out here, and don't 
you let any American capitalists come over here and 
help fasten on you a government like that one they 
still have in America. It's the capitalists that 
plunged America into war. The working class never 
wanted it." 

These are two types of exiles which Russia has 
called back to her bosom since the revolution, both 



86 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



of which constitute another grave problem with 
which the distracted people are struggling. The 
sick ones, of whom there are thousands, came back 
and more of them are coming from Siberia at a 
time when food suitable for the sick is impossible to 
obtain. There was almost no milk. Eggs were 
hard to get and were not very fresh. Food of all 
kinds was getting scarcer every day. There was a 
fuel shortage that threatened to make all Russia 
spend a shivering winter, and what was to become of 
the sick was and still is a grave question. There is a 
great shortage of many medicines. If fighting is 
resumed the hospitals will be overcrowded. Doc- 
tors and nurses will be scarce. Yet the exiles con- 
tinue to come back, the long stream from the remote 
villages continues to hold out its longing hands to 
the people back home, who cannot deny them. And 
nearly all the exiles come back sick and homeless 
and penniless. Russia must take care of those freed 
Siberian exiles, and I don't quite see how she is 
going to do it, unless the miracle happens and they 
find a way of restoring peace and order in the land. 
In that case they can do anything. They can even 
deal with the kind of exile I heard talking on the 
Nevski. 

Carlyle says that of all man's earthly possessions, 
unquestionably the dearest to him are his symbols. 
They have the strongest hold on us without a doubt. 
At the time of the French revolution the sign and 
symbol of the old regime was the Bastille, that state 
prison in Paris which was the living grave of the 
king's enemies, or of almost anybody who made 
himself unpopular with one of the king's favorites. 



THE HOMING EXILES— TWO KINDS 87 



When the French people rose up in their might and 
swept the old regime out, the first thing they did, 
obeying a common impulse, was to tear down and 
destroy utterly the Bastille. In Russia the sign and 
symbol of the autocracy was the exile system, and 
particularly Siberia. The first thing the Russian 
people did when they rose up and dethroned the 
Romanoffs was to send telegrams to every political 
prison and to every convict village in Siberia that the 
prisoners and exiles were free. They sent orders 
to all the jailers and guards that the exiles were 
to be furnished with clothing and money and trans- 
portation to the railroads, and the railroads were 
directed to bring them back to Petrograd. 

There is something to warm the coldest blood in 
the thought of what it must have meant to those 
poor, desolate creatures, living in the hopeless iso- 
lation of Siberia, to have the door of the cell open 
one February day and hear the words, "You are 
free!" Sometimes the announcement was prefaced 
by words of unheard of friendliness and courtesy 
from wardens and jailers who had before been cruel 
and brutal task-masters. "Please forgive me if I 
have been over-zealous in my duties," these men 
would say, and the prisoner would think that he 
had gone mad and was dreaming. Then the an- 
nouncement would come, unbelievable in its wonder; 
the revolution had actually happened. The Czar 
was gone. The prisoner was free. They heard 
that news in the depths of mines, where men worked 
shackled and hopeless. They heard it in lonely vil- 
lages near the Arctic Circle. They heard it in far 
lands, where homesick men and women toiled in 



88 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



sweatshops among aliens. They were free, and 
Mother Russia was calling them home again. I 
should think they would almost have died of joy at 
the tidings. No generous mind can wonder that 
Russia called back her children, all of them, without 
stopping to sort out the good and the bad, the well 
and the sick, the desirable and the undesirable. Or 
without stopping to calculate how she was going to 
take care of them when they got there. 

But very early in the day it became evident that 
Russia was going to face a serious problem in her 
returned exiles. In the very first days of the revo- 
lution they opened all the prison doors in Petrograd 
as well as in other Russian cities, and let all the 
prisoners out. Among them were a number of po- 
liticals, and many of them immediately became pub- 
lic charges. They had no money, no friends, no 
home. The revolution had robbed them, in some 
cases, of all three. In some cases of long imprison- 
ment the homes and friends had been taken from 
them by death. There had been a committee work- 
ing secretly in behalf of political prisoners, and now 
this committee, with a group in the Red Cross, got 
together and formed a society which they call the 
Political Red Cross, the committee in charge of re- 
turned exiles. For they saw plainly that what had 
happened in the case of the Petrograd prisoners 
would be repeated on a large scale when the Si- 
berian exiles and those from foreign lands returned. 
Another committee was formed in Moscow. They 
sprang up in various cities, co-operating with the 
Zemstvoes or county councils. 

At the head of the work is Vera Figner, one of 



THE HOMING EXILES— TWO KINDS 89 



the most famous of the old revolutionists, almost 
the last survivor of the nihilism of the eighteen sev- 
enties. The Russians are said to lack organizing 
ability, but the work done by this committee under 
Vera Figner's direction looks to me that once Rus- 
sia gets a government that can govern and an army 
that will fight the people of Russia will organize a 
civilization that will teach Europe new things. The 
committee started with nothing, not even machinery 
to work with. There is no such thing in Russia as 
a charity organization society. Charity and benevo- 
lence there are, mostly of the old-fashioned type, 
"Under the patronage of her imperial highness, the 
Princess Olga," or "the empress dowager." There 
was no well-organized society of any kind to appeal 
to to help take care of some seventy-five thousand 
exiles hurrying home, an unknown number of them 
sick, another unknown number poor and homeless, 
and all of them strangers in a new Russia. 

Vera Figner I saw in the Petrograd headquarters 
of the society. She is a matronly woman, looking 
less than sixty, although she must be older. She has 
a handsome face, with the deep, smoldering eyes 
of the revolutionist, but her smile is quiet and kind. 
Near her at the long committee table sat Mme. 
Kerenskaia, the estranged wife of the minister pres- 
ident Kerensky. She is an attractive young woman 
with dark eyes and abundant dark hair, who gives 
all of her time to the work of the exiles committee. 
Mme. Gorki is another woman of prominence who 
works with the committees, and Prince Kropotkin 
and his daughter, Mme. Lebedev, whose husband 
was in the government when I left, are also constant 



9o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



workers. The work was done through eight commit- 
tees, one of which collected money, a great deal of 
money, too. Hundreds of thousands of roubles have 
poured in from all over Russia as well as from 
England, America, France. Another committee col- 
lects clothes, and they are much scarcer than money 
in Russia. A committee on home-finding also col- 
lects sanitarium and hospital beds wherever they 
are to be found. A reception committee meets the 
exiles and takes them to their various lodgings. A 
medical and a legal aid committee take care of their 
own sides of the work. All over Petrograd and 
Moscow they have established temporary lodgings 
and temporary hospitals for the cure of the returned 
sick and helpless. It was in such a refuge that I saw 
and heard the man with the concertina. 

I had come to find Marie Spirodonova, one of the 
most appealing as well as the most tragic figures of 
the revolution of 1905-06. She was the Charlotte 
Corday of that revolution, for like Charlotte she, 
unaided by any revolutionary society, freed her 
country of one of the worst monsters of his time. 
She shot and killed the half-mad and wholly hor- 
rible governor of Tambosk. And like Charlotte she 
paid for that deed with her life. She lived indeed 
to return to Russia, but her span after that was 
short. Marie Spirodonova was in the last stages 
of tuberculosis when they brought her back to Rus- 
sia. Ten years' solitary confinement had done that 
for her. The first sentence of death, afterward com- 
muted to twenty years' exile, would have been short- 
er and more merciful. When I saw her she was in 
bed, so wasted that she looked like a child. The 



THE HOMING EXILES— TWO KINDS 91 



flush of fever on her cheeks gave her a false look 
of health, and she looked almost as beautiful as on 
the day when she stood in the prisoner's dock and 
told the judges how and why she killed the monster 
of a governor. Her voice was all but gone now, 
and it was in a hoarse whisper that she greeted me, 
and asked news of her one or two friends in Amer- 
ica. I could stay only a few minutes, she was so 
weak. It is hardly possible that she still lives, al- 
though no news of her death has reached me. 

Until the last breath she must have kept her iron 
will and indomitable spirit. Ten years in a solitary 
cell could not break that spirit, as the story of her 
release shows. When the first telegram came to the 
distant prison, where she and nine other women 
were confined, the names of only eight of them 
were specifically mentioned. 

"But what about us?" wailed the two forgotten 
ones. 

The warden of the prison perhaps did not en- 
tirely believe in the success of the revolution, and 
wanted to be on the safe side. "You stay," he said. 

"Then none of us will go," said Marie Spirodo- 
nova, and they all stayed until the next day when 
another telegram arrived setting them all free. In 
the same spirit Spirodonova refused to leave her 
companions after they reached Petrograd. She was 
so famous, so sought after, that she could have 
chosen among a dozen hospitable homes, in the 
country, in the Crimea or the bracing mountains of 
the Caucasus. But she said she would not have 
anything her old prison mates did not have, so Ma- 
rie Spirodonova, daughter of a general, and the 



92 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



concertina player, child of a peasant, die as they 
lived, revolutionists, spurning all the comforts of 
life, all the protection and security of home, all the 
plaudits of the world. They lived and died for 
Russia as surely as though they died on the battle- 
field. 

Of the same type is the most celebrated exile of 
all, Catherine Breshkovskaia, the Babushka, or little 
grandmother of the revolution. They brought Ba- 
bushka back to Petrograd in the first rush. They 
gave her a reception at the station such as no 
crowned head in Europe ever had, and they took 
her to the Winter Palace and told her that when 
the Czar moved out he left it to her. Babushka lived 
in the Winter Palace when she was in Petrograd, 
which was seldom. Most of the time she was tour- 
ing rural Russia and trying to make her peasants un- 
derstand what the revolution meant, and that they 
would make the country a worse place than it ever 
was before unless they stopped fighting to grab all 
the land in sight without any regard to right and jus- 
tice. "I know them," she said in a brief talk I had 
with her in the palace. "If I can only live long 
enough to reach them in numbers, I can deal with 
them. They have listened to a pack of nonsense, 
but I shall tell them better." 

Breshkovskaia is past seventy years old. She is 
growing very deaf, and her weight makes traveling 
difficult. Yet her mind is clear and vigorous, and 
when she makes a speech she manages somehow to 
call back the voice and the strength of a woman of 
forty. Spirodonova, Breshkovskaia, Kropotkin, 
Tschaikovsky and almost every one of the old 




Prince Felix Yussupoff, at whose palace on the Moika Canal Rasputin 
was killed, and his wife, the Grand Duchess Irene 
Alexandrovna, niece of the late Czar. 



THE HOMING EXILES— TWO KINDS 93 



revolutionists are eager adherents of the moderate 
program of the early provisional government, be- 
fore the Bolsheviki crowded in with their cry of "All 
the power to the Soviets!" They want the war 
fought to a finish, and they want order restored in 
Russia. It is quite otherwise with another type of 
exile, and I am sorry to say some of this other kind 
were made in the United States of America. 

In the boat in which I crossed the Atlantic last 
May there were three Russian men who had spent 
some years in America and were on their way back 
to Petrograd. These men were not exiles, but they 
had found Russia intolerable to live in and had gone 
to America, which had been so kind to them in a 
material way that they were able to go back to Rus- 
sia in the first cabin of an ocean liner. All three 
were pronounced pacifists and one was a readymade 
Bolshevik. He was for the whole program, sep- 
arate peace, no annexations or contributions, no 
sharing the government with the bourgeois, no com- 
promise on anything. A real Bolshevik. And made 
on the east side of New York. This man used to 
talk to me on deck and in the saloon about how the 
Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates were going to 
dictate terms of peace to the allies, and how the 
social revolution was going to spread all over the 
world, and especially all over America, and then he 
would hasten to assure me that he wasn't nearly as 
radical as some of the Tavarishi I would meet in 
Russia, and he wasn't. When we reached the Fin- 
nish frontier and stopped at Tornea for examination 
I had the pleasure of seeing all three of these men 
taken into custody by some remnant of authority 



94 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

existing in the army, and taken down to Petrograd 
under guard as men who had evaded military duty. 
My friend declared that nothing would ever induce 
him to put on a uniform or to fight. Not he. And 
the others rather less confidently echoed his defiance. 
Finally one of them said: "On the whole, I think 
I will enlist. They need educated men at the front 
to talk peace to them." Thus at least one emissary 
of the Kaiser was contributed to poor, bleeding Rus- 
sia by the United States. 

Just one more case, because it is typical of many. 
This man was a real exile, and for eleven years he 
had lived in Chicago. Born in a small city of west- 
ern Russia, he joined, when still a youth, what was 
known as the Bund, a socialist propagandist circle of 
Jewish young men and women. The youth's par- 
ents, quiet, orthodox people, knew nothing of his 
activities, nor of the revolutionary literature of 
which he was custodian and which he had concealed 
in the sand bags piled up around the cottage to keep 
out the winter cold. On May 31, 1905, the Tavar- 
ishi, or comrades, in his town organized a small 
demonstration against the celebration of the Czar's 
birthday. The next day the police began searching 
houses and making arrests among the youth of the 
town, and they found the books hidden in the sand- 
bags. The boy fled, and found refuge in the next 
town. Money was raised, a passport forged and 
the youth finally got to England via Germany. He 
didn't like England and in 1906 he crossed to the 
United States. He didn't like the United States 
either, and his whole career in Chicago was a history 
of agitation and rebellion. He was one of the 



THE HOMING EXILES— TWO KINDS 95 



founders of a socialist Sunday school in Mayor 
Thompson's town, where children of tender years 
are given a thorough education in Bolshevik first 
principles. 

When the Russian revolution broke and Russian 
consuls all over the world advertised for exiles to 
be taken back to Russia's heart, this man presented 
himself as one of the returners. He showed me the 
certificate issued by the Russian consulate in Chi- 
cago. It says that it was issued in accordance with 
the orders of the provisional government and records 

that the said was paid the sum 

of $157.25 and was given transportation from Chi- 
cago to Petrograd, via the Pacific Ocean and the 
Trans-Siberian railroad. At Vladivostock he re- 
ceived more money, and on his arrival in Petrograd 
he was given a small weekly allowance in addition 
to his free lodgings. He had a good time on the 
journey, he said. There was a band at most of 
the stations where the train stopped, crowds, flow- 
ers and much cheering. It was agreeable to get back 
to Petrograd also and be met by a committee. But 
the habit of hating governments was so settled in 
his system that within a week he was talking against 
the one that had paid his way back, and he was 
talking hard against the one which had taken him 
in and given him a free education and a job and 
a chance to establish a socialist Sunday school with 
perfect impunity. He was in with all the Bolshevik 
activities except one. He had no stomach for fight- 
ing. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. 
It got to a point where it was hard to be a Bolshevik 
in good standing and never do any gun work, so 



96 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



this exile determined to go back to Chicago. When 
I knew him he was haunting the committees and 
various ministries trying to persuade them to give 
him the money with which to return. 

"You don't think they can draft me into the 
American army, do you?" he asked me anxiously. 
"I am a Russian subject. I don't see how they could 
do it legally." 

I don't know how many men of this kind went 
back to Russia from the United States, but there 
were enough of them to be conspicuous, and the Rus- 
sian radicals believe them to be far more reliable 
witnesses that the Root Commission, which made a 
remarkably good impression on the educated people 
but none at all on the Tavarishi. "Don't you be- 
lieve that the United States is in this war for de- 
mocracy," shouted one Nevsky Prospect orator. 
u The United States is just as imperialistic as Eng- 
land. You oughtta read what Lincoln Steffens and 
John Reed wrote about the United States and Mex- 
ico." These men will do Russia all the harm they 
can, and then they will come back to America and 
do us all the harm they can. If I had my way they 
would go from Ellis Island, with all the rest of their 
kind still remaining here, to some kind of a devil's 
island in the South Seas and be kept there until they 
died. 



CHAPTER XI 



HOW RASPUTIN DIED 

LOOKING at these exiles, these wrecks of human- 
ity done to death in the name of the state, and re- 
flecting that their number was so great that months 
had to elapse before they could all be located and 
brought back to life, it is not to be wondered at that 
most Russians believed the autocracy a thing too 
strong to be shaken. But the February revolution 
revealed that the autocracy was a tree rotten at the 
roots. At a touch it collapsed. 

The Russian autocracy went down like a house 
of cards, and within an incredibly short time the 
whole horde of ignorant and reactionary ministers, 
grafting generals, corrupt officials, court parasites, 
vagrant monks, mystics and fortune tellers went 
down with it and were buried in its ruins. The 
Czar — a reed shaken in the wind. The Czarina, the 
Empress Dowager, the poor little Czarevitch, Ras- 
putin, Anna Virubova, his sponsor at the court — 
leaves in the current. They all went. In the dead 
of night a group of determined men, led by a nephew- 
in-law of the Czar, murdered a monk, and almost 
the next day the whole Protopopoff-Sturmer gang 
was in the fortress of Peter and Paul and the Ro- 
manoff family was on its way to Siberia. Rasputin, 
it is true, was killed in December, and the revolution 

97 



98 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

did not actually occur until February; but two months 
in the history of a nation is an inconsiderable lapse 
of time. The story of the killing of Rasputin has 
been published in this country, and, in its main facts, 
accuratelyc In some of its important details the 
published stories are in error, and I am glad to be 
able to tell the facts as they were related by Prince 
Felix Yussupoff himself, the man who fired the shot 
that freed Russia. 

Prince Yussupoff did not tell these facts directly 
to me. He told them to Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, 
the English suffragist, with whom he is on terms of 
warm friendship, and gave her permission to repeat 
them to me, which she did within an hour of hearing 
them. Prince Yussupoff was willing that I should 
know the story, but our acquaintance was brief, and 
I am sure that I heard a more detailed account 
through Mrs. Pankhurst than I should have had 
had he talked directly to me, a comparative stran- 
ger. 

Prince Yussupoff did not kill Rasputin, as has been 
charged, because the monk had cast lascivious eyes 
on his beautiful young wife, the Grand Duchess 
Irene Alexandrovna. At least he said nothing 
about her in connection with the affair, and it is 
certain that she took no active part in it. She did 
not lure the monk to the Yussupoff palace on the 
fatal night. She could not have done so because 
she was in the Crimea at the time. Prince Yussup- 
off killed Rasputin because of the man's evil influ- 
ence on the Czar, his wife's uncle, and his worse in- 
fluence on the Czarina. The thing had got beyond 
scandal. It had become unbearable, and when evi- 



HOW RASPUTIN DIED 



99 



dence was presented to him that Rasputin was try- 
ing to influence the royal pair to force Russia into 
a separate peace with Germany, Prince Yussupoff 
decided that the time for Rasputin's death had 
come. Rasputin had to die. He was invited to 
Yussupoff's house and he accepted. Then he died. 

I have often walked past that great, beautiful, 
yellow palace on the Moika canal, the Petrograd 
town house of the Yussupoff family, and tried to 
reconstruct the ghastly drama enacted there on that 
December night. Snow burying the black ice of the 
canal, shrouding the street and silent houses, dim- 
ming the street lights, and in a basement room, a 
private retreat of the lord of the palace, a young 
man sweating from every shivering pore, and watch- 
ing the sinister monk eat and drink deadly poison 
which affected him no more than water. They had 
fed one of the poisoned cakes to a dog, just before 
they sent them downstairs to be fed to Rasputin, 
and the dog died in a few seconds. Rasputin ate 
one and lived. Explain it who can, but cease to 
wonder that the Russians firmly believe that Ras- 
putin was something more than human. 

Excusing himself on some pretext Prince Yussup- 
off went upstairs, where the others waited — young 
Grand Duke Dmitri and two or three other men, 
and told them the incredible news. When he went 
back he had a revolver in his pocket. He and the 
monk resumed their conversation, which was on 
general topics. It was the first time Rasputin had 
visited Yussupoff or had any particular conversation 
with him. The prince was not a favorite at court, 
the empress especially disapproving of certain al- 



*oo INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



leged episodes in his youthful past. For this reason 
young Prince Felix and the monk were on formal 
terms, and it took a great deal of diplomacy to per- 
suade Rasputin to make that midnight visit at all. 
They resumed their interrupted conversation, and in 
the course of it the prince invited Rasputin to cross 
the room and look at an ikon, or sacred picture, 
which hung on the opposite wall. These ikons are 
frequently rare objects of art, gold or silver, and in- 
crusted with gems. The ikon, which was to be the 
last on which Rasputin's gaze was to rest, was an 
antique of almost priceless value. He looked, and 
the next moment a revolver shot tore through his 
side and he crumpled up on the floor without a 
groan. Prince Yussupoff had shot him. 

The prince had never killed a man before, and it 
was natural that, in his revulsion of nerves after 
the deed, he should have rushed from the room. 
He fled upstairs and gasped out that it was over, 
the thing they had sworn to do was done, Rasputin 
was dead. The next thing was to get the body out 
of the house, and this task was rendered the more 
difficult because a policeman who had passed the 
house at the moment when the shot was fired, rang 
a doorbell and insisted on knowing what had oc- 
curred. He was pacified somehow, and one of the 
men went out to get a motor car. Prince Yussupoff 
went downstairs to guard the body until the car 
came. Rasputin lay motionless on the floor beneath 
the jeweled ikon, but as his slayer reached the spot 
where he lay, the monk's body shot up, the monk's 
long arms darted forward and his powerful hands 
reached and clawed for Yussupoff's throat Half 



HOW RASPUTIN DIED 



mad with amazement and horror, the young man 
tore himself loose, leaving one of the epaulets from 
his uniform in the clawing hands. Rushing with 
all his might to the room upstairs, he shrieked: "He 
lives yet ! He is the devil himself ! We cannot kill 
him!" 

"We must kill him!" they shrieked in return, and 
the whole band rushed for the stairs. When they 
opened the door Rasputin was crawling on hands 
and knees up the stairs. His face was diabolic. 
What followed does not make pleasant reading. 
They tried to kill him, crawling toward them, using 
every weapon they could grasp — revolvers, swords, 
daggers, clubs, heavy chairs, even their boots. They 
shot and beat him until he was senseless, but even 
then he did not die. They tied his hands and feet 
and regardless of possible risk of detection they 
loaded the senseless body into a motor car, drove 
to the Neva, a considerable distance, and threw the 
still breathing thing through a hole in the ice. There 
Rasputin died. 

That is the way Prince Yussupoff tells it. The 
world knows how the Czar had the body embalmed 
and buried, and how he and all the royal family 
walked in the funeral procession. It was the in- 
tention of the Empress to build a costly tomb over 
his grave, perhaps a church. They usually built a 
church to commemorate assassinations of royalty, 
and the poor, half-demented Empress of Russia re- 
garded Rasputin as greater than royalty. Perhaps 
if the revolution of February had not succeeded the 
church would have been built, loaded with gold and 
art treasures, as those Russian churches are, and 



102 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



might in time have become a shrine in which the 
superstitious would pray for miracles. But the rev- 
olution did succeed, and one of the first things they 
did was to unearth the corpse of Rasputin and give 
it another burial. I heard several accounts of that 
burial, all of them horrible. One account has it 
that the body was burned. It doesn't make any real 
difference. Rasputin had to be killed, and he was. 
The burial was nothing unless you find something 
symbolic in the uneasy character of the man even 
after he was dead. It does indicate, strangely, the 
sinister nature of the whole Rasputin episode. 

No arrests followed the killing of Rasputin, al- 
though the men who did it were known almost from 
the first. Rasputin's family, with whom he lived in 
Petrograd, knew where he went on his death night, 
and when he did not return they telephoned Tsar- 
skoe Selo to ask if he was there. The royal family 
lived in the Alexander palace at Tsarskoe, and Ras- 
putin often visited them there. But he did not live 
at court, as many people seem to think. The Czar- 
ina, frightened half to death, sent for the Petrograd 
chief of police and the dragnet immediately thrown 
out drew in the policeman who had heard a revolver 
shot from the yellow palace on the Moika canal. 
The chief of police went in person to the Yussupoff 
palace and found it a shambles. Prince Felix had 
been so nearly prostrated by the events of the night 
— he is really little more than a boy — that he had 
not even had the place cleaned. The prince at first 
refused to tell anything of the affair and he stead- 
fastly refused to divulge the names of the men who 
had helped him do the deed. But little by little the 



HOW RASPUTIN DIED 



police unearthed the whole story, and the frantic 
Czarina learned that at least two of the assassins 
were of the blood royal. She demanded their pun- 
ishment, and the Czar joined with her in the demand. 

They would have sent all the men to the farthest 
Siberian mine if they had had their way. But there 
was a meeting of the Romanoff clan in the Tsarskoe 
palace, probably more than one meeting. The grand 
dukes were all there, and the Empress Dowager. 
They told the royal pair that nobody must suffer 
for the deed. Horrible as it was, it had to happen 
some time, because assassination was the certain end 
of men like Rasputin. They told the Emperor and 
Empress plainly that they were fortunate that only 
one assassination had taken place. Nobody at that 
time knew that the revolution was close at hand. 
None of the Romanoff family believed that the rev- 
olution would ever come. But they knew — all of 
them except the Czar and his wife — that the house 
of Romanoff was due to have a thorough cleaning, 
and they were thankful at heart that Prince Felix 
and young Grand Duke Dmitri had had the nerve 
to begin the work. The young grand duke was sent 
to the Caucasus and Prince Felix was banished to 
his estates. I don't know where the lesser lights 
were sent, but certainly they were not arrested. The 
grand duke is still in the Caucasus, the provisional 
government wisely considering him well off out there 
on the Persian border. 

Prince Yussupoff is not only free but he is some- 
thing of a popular hero still. He is very demo- 
cratic, is openly sympathetic with the revolution, al- 
though he detests the Bolsheviki, who have turned 



io4 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



revolution into riot. The constitutional democrats 
and other conservative revolutionists admire the 
young man, and there is even a group, I don't know 
how large, which would like to see him the consti- 
tutional monarch of Russia. He is not a Romanoff, 
but his wife is. She is young, rarely beautiful and a 
great favorite in society. As for Prince Felix, he 
belongs if not to royalty, to a family which has inter- 
married more than once with royalty. On his 
father's side he is Count Sumarokoff-Elston, the lat- 
ter name indicating British descent, the original Els- 
ton coming over from Scotland during the reign of 
the Empress Catherine. He gained her favor and 
secured the title and estates of Sumarokoff. The 
father of Prince Felix assumed, by Imperial decree, 
the title of Prince Yussupoff on his marriage with the 
beautiful Princess Yusupova, the last of her line, 
who thus perpetuated the family name. The Yussup- 
offs are one of the oldest and wealthiest families in 
Russia. Their origin runs back into the half-fabulous 
days of Tartar domination, the name Yussupoff be- 
ing Tartar, and not Russian at all. It means Jo- 
seph's son. The title, however, dates back only about 
a century. Prince Felix is the head of the family, 
his elder brother having been killed in a duel some 
years ago on French soil. He is barely thirty years 
old, and looks much younger. Nobody would be 
likely to pick out this man in a crowd for an assassin. 
He is tall and slender, and almost too handsome. 
With his fine features, dark, melancholy eyes and 
ivory skin he might almost be called effeminate in ap- 
pearance. One sees such men only in very old fami- 
lies where the vigor has begun to run low. There is 



HOW RASPUTIN DIED 



plenty of vigor left in Prince Felix, however. He 
has an Oxford education, and speaks English per- 
fectly. He speaks many other languages besides, 
as the highly educated Russians are all supposed 
to do, but which they frequently do not. French 
is commonly spoken, of course. 

I had a long talk with Prince Felix Yussupoff in 
Moscow, and we talked, most of the time, about the 
American public school system. He wanted to know 
what the Gary system was, and fortunately I was 
able to tell him. As I described the schools, where 
children spent their days, working, studying, play- 
ing, being wholly educated and trained to think as 
well as to work, the prince's eyes glowed and his 
face shone with interest and amazement. ''It's the 
finest thing I ever heard of," he exclaimed. "It is 
exactly what we ought to have in Russia." And 
then he went on to say thoughtfully: "Mrs. Dorr, 
my wife and I want to do something for Russia, 
something really worth while. I don't want to be 
forever remembered for — for just one thing. I 
want to do something constructive. Of course, as 
things are now, there is nothing constructive to be 
done. Besides, my wife is a Romanoff, and, natur- 
ally " He paused with a graceful little gesture 

of the hand. Naturally a Romanoff couldn't be con- 
spicuous in any way just then. "But when the time 
comes, if it ever does, when Russia is normal again, 
why shouldn't the contribution I make be to the edu- 
cation of children?" 

"The salvation of your country lies in the educa- 
tion of its children, all of them, not just the children 
of the rich," I replied. 



io6 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



"I believe it," was the earnest response. "And 
I want to help establish the best public school sys- 
tem in the world in Russia. How can I do it?" 

I told him, to the best of my ability. And he 
promised me that he would carry out my suggestions. 
Prince Felix Yussupoff means to spend the next year 
or two studying the American public school, and es- 
pecially the Gary system. He doesn't want to be 
remembered for just one thing. 



CHAPTER XII 



ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS 

"Let any American mother imagine that her only 
son, who came into the world a weakling, and whose 
life had always hung on a thread, had been miracu- 
lously restored to health. Suppose also that the 
person who did this wonderful thing was not a doc- 
tor, but a monk of that mother's church. Wouldn't 
it be natural for that mother to regard the man 
with almost superstitious gratitude for the rest of 
her life? Wouldn't it also be natural that she would 
want to keep the monk near her, at least until the 
child grew up, in order to have the benefit of his 
advice and help in case of a return of the illness?" 

I had heard the story of the Rasputin murder as 
told by one of the principals in the gory tragedy, 
Prince Felix Yussupoff, and now I was to hear it 
again, this time from one of the reputed "dark 
forces," of which Rasputin had been the head and 
front, Anna Virubova, the intimate friend and con- 
fidante of the Empress of Russia, and believed 
by many to be the chief accomplice of Rasputin. I 
had heard all sorts of horrible stories about this 
woman. It was said that she was Rasputin's pro- 
curess. It was said that she conspired with him 
to make the Empress believe that the Czarevitch 

107 



io8 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



would die if the monk were sent away from court, 
or if he voluntarily withdrew. On the several oc- 
casions when he did go, Madame Virubova was 
said to have fed the child with minute doses of poi- 
son, so that he sickened, and when that happened of 
course the frantic mother demanded the return of 
Rasputin. 

As the monk's appetite for power grew and he 
demanded the removal of this or that metro- 
politan or bishop, the removal or appointment of 
ministers, the suppression of newspapers that de- 
nounced him, the Czarina, urged on by her friend 
Madame Virubova, would insist that Rasputin 
should have his way. Otherwise he might leave, and 
the Czarevitch would surely die. Madame Viru- 
bova was also said to have conspired with a court 
physician to poison the Czar, or rather to put con- 
stant doses of some toxic in his food in order to 
cloud his mind, and thus make him an easier dupe 
for the pro-German conspirators. They told the 
most amazing stories about this woman, making her 
out a sort of a combination of Lucrezia Borgia and 
Jezebel. 

Whether the provisional government believed 
these stories or not, the Duma members who 
forced the revolution evidently believed Anna Vi- 
rubova to be one of the most dangerous of the 
inner court circle, or camarilla, which was planning 
a German peace. For when the Czar was forced to 
abdicate, and all the accused men of the camarilla 
were arrested and thrown into the fortress of Peter 
and Paul, Madame Virubova was also arrested 
and sent to the fortress. She was taken out of a 



ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS 



sick bed — there had been an epidemic of measles 
in the royal family — thrown into an underground 
cell and kept there for three months. At the end 
of that time she was in such a state of collapse that 
the prison physician recommended her removal to 
a hospital. To this the provisional government con- 
sented, but when the order for her release was pre- 
sented to the governor of the fortress, and he or- 
dered her cell door unlocked, the soldiers on duty 
refused to obey the order. It was days before they 
were persuaded to let her go. Madame Virubova 
was sent to a hospital for a month, and then they 
set her free. That is, they permitted her to go to 
the home of her brother-in-law, who is a stepson 
of the Grand Duke Paul, and to live there under 
strict surveillance. They had searched her house in 
Tsarskoe Selo, and her rooms in the palace. They 
had put her through every kind of cross examination, 
not once but many times, and they were forced to 
admit that they could not discover a single incrimi- 
nating circumstance, or any evidence of poisoning or 
conspiracy. They had to release her, but she was not 
allowed to leave the country, or even her brother's 
house, without permission, which, of course, would 
not be granted. She was watched all the time, and 
might be rearrested and given the third degree at any 
time if the least bit of evidence seemed to warrant it. 

Anna Virubova is considered a very dangerous 
woman. She is one of two things, very dangerous 
or very much maligned. She gave me the impres- 
sion, after two long, intimate talks, of a woman ab- 
solutely innocent of any wrongdoing. If she is a 
criminal she ought to be put in prison for life, for 



no INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



her powers of deceit are simply marvelous. I liked 
Anna Virubova, and I don't think I could possibly 
like a woman capable of poisoning little boys or 
handing innocent young girls over into the claws of 
a lascivious monk. 

How I met this woman, how she came to talk 
confidentially with me, where I saw her and when, 
are not to be written just now. They could not be 
published without injuring a number of people, per- 
haps including Madame Virubova herself. I saw 
and talked with her soon after her release from the 
prison hospital. She was still a little drawn and 
haggard from the hardships and the terror of her 
experiences in Peter and Paul, and she was in the 
depth of despondency over the plight of her friend 
the Czarina. She is a very pretty woman, this al- 
leged Borgia-Jezebel. She has an abundance of 
brown hair and her eyes are large and deeply blue. 
Her features are regular, and her mouth curves like 
a child's. Two or three years ago the train on which 
she was traveling between Petrograd and Tsarskoe 
Selo was wrecked, some say purposely. Madame 
Virubova was desperately injured, both legs being 
broken and her spine wrenched. She was lamed 
for life and walks with a crutch, but in spite of that 
all her movements are singularly graceful. One of 
the stories about her is that she was a peasant girl 
brought to court by Rasputin and forced on the Em- 
press as a convenient tool of the conspirators. This 
is quite untrue. Madame Virubova is a patrician 
by birth, and before she was born, and long before 
Rasputin appeared in Tsarskoe Selo, her family 
was attached to the court. The father and the 



ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS in 

grandfather of Madame Virubova were court of- 
ficials, confidential secretaries to the emperors of 
their times. Both her parents are living and I have 
met them both. They are highly educated and un- 
mistakably well bred. They are not rich people, but 
they live in a very beautiful apartment in an exclu- 
sive quarter of Petrograd. 

For more than a dozen years Mme. Virubova 
lived on terms of closest friendship with the Czarina. 
She did not live at court, at least she did not until 
after the murder of Rasputin, when she went to the 
palace to be near the frightened and despairing Em- 
press. She had a house of her own in Tsarskoe 
Selo, and it was at her house that the Empress met 
the monk who was to have such a sinister influence 
on her after life. The Empress, who was never pop- 
ular at court, and never happy there, liked to have a 
place where she could go and throw off her imperial 
character, be a woman among her intimate friends, 
care free. Such a refuge was Mme. Virubova's 
home to the melancholy Alexandra, wife of the Em- 
peror of all the Russias. Mme. Virubova's hus- 
band was an officer in the navy, and gossip had it 
that he disapproved of his wife's friendship with 
the Empress, and disapproved still more of the peo- 
ple who were invited to meet her in his home. Ras- 
putin was not the only one of the mystics and char- 
latans she met and talked with, it appears. The 
Empress was deeply religious, and she was interested 
in all kinds of strange and mystical doctrines. The 
husband of Mme. Virubova was not, and he feared, 
as well he might, that almost any kind of a political 
plot might be hatched by that "little group of seri- 



ii2 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



ous thinkers" who met in his drawing room and in 
the scented boudoir of his wife. They quarreled. 
It got to the point where they did nothing but quar- 
rel, and one day Mme. Virubova was given a choice 
between her husband and her friend. She chose the 
friend, and thenceforth she occupied the house in 
Tsarskoe Selo alone. The husband went to sea, and 
after a year or two he died. 

Something of this Madame Virubova told me, 
and the rest a friend of the husband told me. In 
her story the husband appears as a jealous, unrea- 
sonable, bad tempered man, almost a lunatic. In 
her friend's story he appears a martyr. "I have not 
had a very amusing life," said Anna Virubova, in 
speaking of her marriage. She smiled, a little bit- 
terly. "Perhaps that is one reason why I, like the 
Empress, was attracted to religion, why we both 
liked and trusted Rasputin. We did trust him, and 
to the end everything he did justified our confidence. 
As for the Empress's feeling for him I give you 
my solemn word of honor it was solely that of a 
grateful mother, and a devout member of the Or- 
thodox church." And then she spoke the words 
with which I have opened this chapter. "Let any 
American mother imagine that she had an only son 
who had come into the world a weakling, one whose 
life had always hung on a thread, and that that 
child had suddenly and miraculously been restored 
to health. Let her suppose that the person who did 
this wonderful thing was not a doctor but a monk 
of her own church. Wouldn't it be natural for that 
mother to regard the man with almost superstitious 
gratitude for the rest of her life? Wouldn't it also 



ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS 113 

be natural that she should want to keep the monk 
near her, at least until the child grew up, in order 
to have the benefit of his advice and help in case of 
return of the illness ? Well, that is the whole truth 
about the Empress and Rasputin." 

"But did Rasputin really heal the Czarevitch, and 
restore him to health?" I asked. 

"Judge for yourself," she replied. "Perhaps you 
know how ardently the birth of a son was desired 
by both the Emperor and the Empress. They had 
four girls, but a woman may not inherit the Russian 
throne. A boy was wanted, and when at last he came, 
a poor little sickly baby, the Empress was nearly 
in despair. The child had a rare disease, one which 
the doctors have never been able to cure. The blood 
vessels were affected, so that the patient bled at the 
slightest touch. Even a small wound would endan- 
ger his life. He might bleed to death of a cut fin- 
ger. In addition to this the boy developed tubercu- 
losis of the hip. It seemed impossible that he could 
ever live to grow up. He was a dear child, always, 
beautiful, clever and lovable. Even had less hung 
on his life than succession to the throne it would 
have been hard to give him up. Each one of his 
successive illnesses racked the Empress with such ter- 
ror and anguish that her mind almost gave away. 
For a long time she was so melancholy that she had 
to live in seclusion under the care of nurses. It was 
not so much assassins that she feared. It was that 
the child should die of the maladies that afflicted 
him. And, in addition to all this daily and hourly 
anxiety and pain she suffered, the poor Empress was 
torn this way and that by the grand dukes and all 



ii4 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



the members of the court circle. Each one had a 
remedy or a treatment they wanted applied to the 
child. There were always new doctors, new treat- 
ments, new operations in the air. The Empress was 
criticized bitterly because she wouldn't try them all. 

The Empress Dowager — well " Virubova 

looked at me and we both smiled. The mother-in- 
law joke is as sadly amusing in a palace as in a Har- 
lem flat. 

"Then came Rasputin," continued Madame Vi- 
rubova. "And he said to the Empress: 'Don't 
worry about the child. He is going to live, and he 
is going to get well. He doesn't need medicine, he 
needs as much of a healthy, outdoor life as his con- 
dition can stand. He needs to play with a dog and 
a pony. He needs a sled. Don't let the doctors 
give him any except the mildest medicines. Don't 
on any account allow them to operate. The boy 
will soon show improvement, and then he will get 
well.';' 

"Did Rasputin sav that he was going to heal 
him?" I asked. 

"Rasputin simply said that the boy was going to 
get well, and he told us almost the day and the hour 
when the boy would begin to get well. 'When the 
child is twelve years old,' Rasputin told us, 'he will 
begin to improve. He will improve steadily after 
that, and by the time he is a man he will be in ordi- 
nary health like other men.' And very shortly after 
he turned twelve years old he did begin to improve. 
He improved rapidly, just as Rasputin said he would, 
and within a few months he could walk. Before 
that, when he went out it was in the arms of a sol- 



ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS 115 



dier, who loved him better than his own life, and 
would have gladly given his life if that could have 
brought health to his prince. The man's joy when 
the child really began to walk, began to play with 
his dog and his pony, was equaled only by that of 
the empress. For the first time in her life in Rus- 
sia she was happy. Do you blame her, do you 
blame me for being grateful to Rasputin? Whether 
he cured him or God cured him, I know no more 
than you do. But Rasputin told us what was going 
to happen, and when it was going to happen. Make 
of it what you will." 

Rasputin told the Empress of Russia that her son 
would begin to improve when he was twelve years 
old. Almost any doctor might have told her that 
it was not unlikely that he would begin to improve 
as soon as adolescence began. Many childish weak- 
nesses, and even some very grave constitutional 
weaknesses, have been known to disappear gradu- 
ally from that period. Empresses and ladies in 
waiting are not usually medical experts, but they 
might have learned that much from ordinary read- 
ing, if the doctors failed to enlighten them. But 
neither Alexandra nor Virubova knew it, and when 
Rasputin threw that gigantic bluff at them they 
grabbed it. As a guesser Rasputin was a wonder, 
for the almost impossible happened and the sick 
little Czarevitch lived up to his prediction. That's 
what I make of it. 

When the Czarevitch grows to manhood, if he 
ever does, and reads the history of his father's and 
mother's last years as rulers of Russia, what a sub- 
ject for reflection this whole Rasputin episode will 



u6 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



afford him! He was the pawn shoved back and 
forth across the chessboard where the destinies of 
nearly two hundred million Russians, to say nothing 
of the Romanoff family, were being decided. He 
was the bait with which the biggest game in modern 
European politics was played. He and a wily monk 
and two women with a taste for mystical religion. 

u This was the beginning of the close friendship 
between Rasputin and the royal family," Madame 
Virubova continued. "But it was by no means the 
only tie between them. Whatever anybody says 
about Rasputin, whatever there may have been that 
was irregular in his private life, whatever he may 
have done in the way of political plotting, this much 
I shall always believe about him, he was clairvoy- 
ant, he had second sight, and he used it, at least 
sometimes, for good and holy purposes. His pre- 
diction about the health of the Czarevitch was only 
one instance. Often and often he told us that such 
and such thing would happen, and it always did. 
The Emperor and Empress consulted him at several 
crises in their lives, and he always told them what 
they ought to do. In each and every case the advice 
was wise. It was miraculously wise. No one except 
a person gifted with second sight could possibly have 
known how to give it." 

"Was Rasputin as bad as they say he was?" I 
asked. 

"He couldn't have been," she answered. "But 
he may have been more or less licentious. Unfortu- 
nately you find men, even in holy orders, who are 
weak in certain ways. I can only answer positively 
for myjself and the Empress. The charge that either 



ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS 117 



of us ever had any personal relation with Rasputin 
was a foul slander. Nothing of the kind ever ex- 
isted, or ever could have existed. Oh," she cried, 
a sudden flame dyeing her white cheeks, "how easy, 
very easy, it is to say that kind of thing about a 
woman. Nobody ever asks for proofs. Accusation 
and judgment are joined instantly together. Why, 
Rasputin was just a wandering monk when we met 
him. He was dirty, uneducated, uncouth. He did 
learn to wear a clean shirt and to preserve a sort of 
cultivated manner when he came to court. That was 
not very often, by the way. I am sure that the Em- 
press did not see him more than six or eight times 
a year, and the Emperor saw him more rarely than 
that." 

"Was he a German agent? Was he a part of 
the political intrigue that threatened a separate 
peace for Russia?" 

Anna Virubova was silent for a long minute. 
She seemed to be pondering. Then she spoke, and 
her eyes were the candid eyes of a child. "Truly, 
I do not know. Certainly I did not believe it in Ras- 
putin's lifetime, but now — I do not know. This 
much I do know, that it was difficult, very difficult, 
at the Russian court, to avoid being drawn into po- 
litical intrigues. You know, of course, what a court 
is like." 

"No," I said, "I don't know anything about a 
court. Tell me what it is like." 

"There is only one word in English to describe 
it," replied Mme. Virubova. "That word is 'rot- 
ten.' A court is made up of numberless little cliques, 
each one with its endless gossip, its whisperings, its 



n8 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



secrets and its plots, big and small. There is noth- 
ing too big or too small for these cliques to concern 
themselves with. They plot international political 
changes, and they plot private murders. They plot 
to ruin the mind and the morals of an Emperor, and 
they plot to break up a friendship between two 
women. They plot to raise this one to power and 
they plot to bring about the fall of another. They 
plot in peace and they plot in war. The person 
who lives at court and is not drawn into some of 
these plots is an exception to the rule. That is all 
that I can say. However, Rasputin, as I told you 
before, never lived at court. He did not even live 
in Petrograd. Most of his time was spent in Si- 
beria, and he ought to have been in Siberia on the 
day he was murdered. But he had a home in Petro- 
grad, where his wife and two daughters lived while 
the girls were being educated. Rasputin was very 
fond of those girls, and he was visiting them when 
that Yussupoff boy killed him." Mme. Virubova 
usually spoke of Prince Felix Yussupoff as "that 
Yussupoff boy." 



CHAPTER XIII 



MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT 

In an even, passionless voice Anna Virubova 
went on to tell me the story of the murder in the 
Yussupoff palace, as it had appeared to the slain 
man's devotees in Tsarskoe Selo. 

"We knew that certain people were plotting to 
kill Rasputin. His life was attempted, you may 
know, at least three times. But it never entered our 
minds that Prince Yussupoff was in the plot. He 
was not a favorite with the Empress, who thought 
him a very dissolute young man. Still, he was in 
Tsarskoe once in a while, because his wife, who is 
a lovely girl, often came, and sometimes he came 
with her. On one of his last visits he saw the Em- 
press. I was in the room and I heard him say, quite 
casually, that he had invited Rasputin to come to 
his house. 'My wife wants to meet him,' he said. 

"We thought no more about it, but on the morn- 
ing after the dreadful thing happened one of Raspu- 
tin's daughters called me on the telephone and asked 
me if I knew where her father was, and if not would 
I telephone the palace and find out if he was there. 
Some intuition seemed to tell me that something ter- 
ribly wrong had occurred. 

"Trying not to let my voice tremble, I asked the 
girl when her father had left the house and with 

119 



iao INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



whom. 'He left about midnight,' she answered. 'I 
don't know whose motor car it was that came for 
him, but he told us he was going to call on Prince 
YussupofL 1 I did not telephone the palace to ask 
about Rasputin. I went there as quickly as I could 
and told the Empress my news. 'He went to see 
Felix?' she exclaimed. 'Why should he have gone 
there now, when Irene is in the Crimea?' We 
looked at each other and the same kind of awful 
fear looked out of her eyes that had gathered in 
my heart. 'Send for the chief of police at once/ 
said the Empress. 'Tell him to come as fast as he 
possibly can.' It is almost too terrible for me to 
tell you. The police found the Yussupoff house in 
the most ghastly state of blood and — ugh!" she ex- 
claimed, "it made me sick to hear them describe it, 
and it makes me sick just to remember it." After a 
moment she continued, real feeling in her voice. 
"The thing was not difficult to trace. The Yussup- 
off boy denied everything at first, made up a silly 
story about a dog that had to be killed." 

When Mme. Virubova said this I admit I shud- 
dered. It was evident that she did not grasp the 
subtlety of that "silly story about a dog that had to 
be killed." 

"While Prince Felix was still insisting that no 
crime had been committed the police found the hole 
in the ice, and around it, on the snow, many blood- 
stains. And then they found the poor corpse. They 
had killed him, first by shooting and then by every 
horrible means in their power. He was shot in the 
head and in the body, crushed and mangled almost 
beyond recognition. There was one frightful, rag^ 



MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT 121 



ged wound across his stomach which could only have 
been made with a spur, the doctors told us. When 
he had been beaten until he was helpless those men 
tied him up with meters of rope and threw him in 
the river to drown. He must have regained con- 
sciousness at the end, because he had dragged one 
arm partially free and by his hand we knew that 
he tried to make the sign of the cross. Yussupoff 
persisted in his denials until Grand Duke Michael 
and his son drove to the palace and told the Czar 
that they were all more or less in it, and that it 
had been a good thing to do. A good thing to mur- 
der and mutilate a defenseless man! Well, you 
asked me what a court was like. 

"There was a terrific time at the palace. The 
Emperor was horrified, and the Empress, I think, 
was nearer the insanity they accused her of than she 
had ever been before. They demanded the name 
of every man and woman connected with the plot, 
and promised that every one of them should be 
brought to sternest justice. But what power had 
they, after all? The grand dukes and the whole 
family stood as one against the Emperor and Em- 
press. They declared that no one should be pun- 
ished for that atrocious crime. I cannot tell you 
all they said and did, because that would be reveal- 
ing confidences. But they held a strong enough club 
over the poor Emperor when they threatened to de- 
sert him in a troubled and uncertain time. He was 
absolutely forced to agree that only the principal 
plotters should be banished to their estates, and the 
others should be left unpunished. Afterward, when 
we could talk about it at all," Mme. Virubova re- 



122 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



sumed, "I reminded the Empress that the day before 
Rasputin was murdered that Yussupoff boy had tele- 
phoned to me asking me to arrange for him to see 
the Empress. She had declined to see him, and we 
both believe that if she had received him he would 
have killed her and then, very likely, me also. We 
are convinced that there was a great assassination 
plot all laid. But there is no proof." 

This, then, is how the Rasputin murder appears in 
the reverse. Prince Felix Yussupoff did not look 
like a wholesale assassin to me, but, then, neither 
did Anna Virubova look like a poison plotter. 
Evidently you have to be accustomed to the atmos- 
phere of courts to judge these things. I don't judge 
anybody in this grewsome drama. I leave that to 
history. 

I asked Mme. Virubova why the court cliques 
plotted against the Empress. "It was inevitable," 
she replied. "The Empress came there, a stranger, 
a poor, beautiful, painfully shy young girl. She did 
not know how to flatter or win favor. She was stu- 
dious, and she was devoted to her husband and chil- 
dren. They needed her devotion — oh, far more 
than the ordinary family needs that of the mother. 
You have heard, I suppose, some of the atrocious 
slanders that have been circulated about the Em- 
press. One of these had it that she encouraged the 
Emperor in his weakness for alcohol because she 
wanted to keep him in a muddled state of mind and 
herself be the real ruler of Russia. The exact op- 
posite is true. The poor Emperor did drink too 
much sometimes, but it was not her fault. There 
were others at that court who were vitally inter- 



MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT 123 



ested in keeping their Emperor in a muddled state 
of mind, and they constantly played on his weak- 
ness. His wife fought for him desperately, did 
everything in her power to save him from these men. 

"Another slander said that the Empress tried to 
Germanize the court, and that she made her children 
talk German to her. The children almost never 
spoke a word of German to her or to any one else. 
Of course they were taught German, with other lan- 
guages, but English and Russian were the only two 
languages spoken in the family circle. The Em- 
press was anxious for all her children to be good 
linguists, but not all of them were gifted that way. 
Tatiana, the second daughter, for example, declared 
that she never would be able to carry on a conver- 
sation in French, the easiest of all foreign tongues. 
But English they all spoke from their cradles. 

"As for the Empress's intrigues for a separate 
peace with Germany," and here Mme. Virubova's 
voice trembled with indignation, "that was the great- 
est nonsense and the wickedest slander of them all. 
From the time the war broke out until the revolution 
last February the Empress was tireless in her work 
for the Russian soldiers and their families. She 
fairly lived in the hospitals at Tsarskoe Selo. Im- 
mediately after breakfast every morning she began 
her rounds, dressed in the plain cotton frock of the 
Red Cross nurse. There was no duty too humble, no 
task too arduous for her to undertake. She stood 
beside the surgeons in the operating room, seeing the 
most dreadful amputations. She sat beside the suf- 
fering and the dying in their beds. 'Stand near me, 
czaritza,' a poor wretch would cry to her in his an- 



124 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



guish and pain, and she would take his rough hand 
and soothe him, pray for him, that he might bear it 
for Russia. They loved her then, those men, though 
they turned against her afterward. We used to mo- 
tor home for luncheon and then go to more hos- 
pitals. It would be 5 o'clock before we reached 
home, and then the Empress always sent for her 
children. What time did she have, will you tell me, 
for German intrigues? 

"The home life of the royal family was happy 
and harmonious above any I have ever seen," in- 
terpolated Mme. Virubova. "The Czar worshiped 
his wife and the children worshiped both of them. 
Would you believe that some of those court para- 
sites tried to break up that happy home? Once 
when the Emperor was at Livadia, in the Crimea, 
some one sent each day a great basket of flowers to 
be placed on his writing table. Attached to the bas- 
ket was my card. They thought they could make 
the Empress believe that I was carrying on an in- 
trigue with the Emperor. As a matter of fact, the 
Empress asked me directly if I sent the flowers. I 
had not heard a word of it before, and if she had 
merely sent me away I should never have known 
the reason. Against me they plotted ceaselessly. 
Why? Because the Empress loved and trusted me, 
and I would have died for her, and they all knew 
it. They resented our friendship. They hated to 
see us sitting together hours at a time over our 
books. We read a great deal. It may interest you 
to know that we read many American books." 

"What American books did the Empress read?" I 
asked. 



MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT 125 



"We read Mrs. Eddy's book, of course, and the 
complete works of the great American author, 
Miller." 

"Miller?" I interrupted. "What Miller?" 

"I don't remember his first name," said Mme. 
Virubova. "But you must know who I mean. He 
wrote many religious and philosophical works. The 
Empress was very fond of them." 

I was obliged to confess that I had never heard 
of Miller, and Mme. Virubova looked her sur- 
prise. 

"Another reason why the Empress, and of course 
myself, were unpopular was because the children 
were with us so much of the time. The Empress 
simply would not allow them to associate with the 
sons and daughters of the nobility. She wanted to 
keep them sweet and clean minded and good, and she 
knew that very few of the children of high society 
in Russia were fit companions for them. The 
daughters of our nobility are mostly frivolous, sel- 
fish, empty-headed girls, and as for the sons, they 
are too often debauched in early boyhood. You can 
imagine that the Empress's poor opinion of them 
and her refusal to allow her children to know them 
aroused great resentment. People always think 
their own children perfect, you know." 

The former Empress of Russia is one of the enig- 
mas of histories. Mme. Virubova, who knew her 
better than almost any other living woman, makes 
her out a religious devotee and something of a puri- 
tan. She does not reveal her as an intellectual 
woman, in spite of her love of books. A really in- 
telligent woman in her position would not have spent 



126 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



so much of her time in the wards of hospitals in the 
one small town of Tsarskoe Selo. She would have 
used her brains, her vast wealth and her almost 
unlimited power to organize the work of the hospi- 
tals all over the war area. I have seen some of 
those hospitals, and while some of them are modern 
and well equipped, many are of the crudest descrip- 
tion. I never saw such a thing as a fly screen in any 
Russian hospital. Flies seem to be regarded as 
harmless domestic pets even in contagious disease 
hospitals in Russia. 

The Empress may or may not have been a Ger- 
man plotter. I heard it said on high authority that 
the minutest search of all the palace records, after 
the revolution, failed to unearth any evidence to 
that effect. Practically everybody in Russia, how- 
ever, believes that she was a traitor to her country 
in the war. Those who are charitably disposed to- 
ward her say that she was melancholy, mad, irre- 
sponsible, and a weak tool in the hands of Russia's 
enemies. But when the days of revolution burst on 
the palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and the night of per- 
petual extinction began to descend on the royal house 
of Romanoff, it was this woman, the Empress of 
Russia, who alone showed strength of mind and 
character. She alone of the whole court kept her 
head and her cool nerve, and kept them to the last. 

Much has been made of Alexandra's influence 
over the weak and yielding Emperor. It is said that 
the Empress, when arguments failed to move him, re- 
sorted to hysterical fits which invariably brought re- 
sults. But this may be the merest gossip. Alexan- 
dra's influence over her husband was probably as 



MORE LEAVES IN THE CURRENT 127 



strong as the average wife's, but is it not a little cu- 
rious that, while few countries allow women to in- 
herit a throne and not all countries allow women to 
vote, when anything happens to a dynasty they al- 
ways discover that the queen was the only member 
of the family who had any brains or any strength 
of character? The troubles of the whole house of 
Bourbon have been ascribed to Marie Antoinette, 
and the fall of the third empire and the house of 
Bonaparte was caused by the malign influence of 
Josephine. 

Rasputin is another actor in the drama who will 
have to be judged by the historians. I firmly believe 
that Rasputin as a dark force was very much over- 
rated. I have no doubt that he was a wicked, de- 
ceitful, plotting creature, a monster of sensuality, an 
impostor and an all-around bad lot. That seems to 
be settled. But I cannot find much evidence that he 
was anything more than a tool of the German plot- 
ters, whoever they were. He exercised great influ- 
ence, but it seems to me that almost everything he 
did was out of personal spite. He demanded the 
suppression of a newspaper that attacked him, the 
removal of a minister who insulted him. His prin- 
cipal activities were against men in the orthodox 
church. Here he was about as venomous as a rattle- 
snake. An obscure monk, it filled him with pride 
and joy to humble a bishop, to unfrock a priest, to 
influence appointments. 

Rasputin had a small, mean mind, and his ego- 
tism was colossal. Of course the women fools at 
court who flattered and deferred to him, perhaps 
worse, fostered this egotism until it reached the limit 



128 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



of inflation. But Rasputin, I believe, will live in his- 
tory more as a scandal than as a menace to Russia. 
He was a menace also, because a bad, weak man is 
often even more of a menace than a bad, strong one. 
The weakling is almost sure sooner or later to fall 
into the hands of plotters and criminals, and under 
their directing power he becomes as dangerous as 
a rabid animal. 



CHAPTER XIV 



THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 

I asked Mme. Virubova to tell me what hap- 
pened at the palace during the revolution and how 
the royal family received the news of its overthrow. 

"I can tell you only what I personally know," she 
replied, "and I was very ill in bed when it happened. 
All the children had measles and, helping the em- 
press nurse them, I was stricken too. The Empress 
was an angel. She went from one room to another 
caring for us, waiting on us, while all the time anx- 
iety must have been tearing cruelly at her heart- 
strings. Once or twice she said something to me 
about trouble in Petrograd, food riots. 

u The scarcity of food had preyed on the Em-' 
press's mind for many months, and one of the last 
conversations she ever had with Rasputin was on 
that subject. The winter of 191 6 set in early, and 
the snows were so deep that transportation of all 
kinds of things, food included, was greatly impeded. 
I remember that the Empress said to Rasputin that 
nature itself seemed to be conspiring against poor 
Russia that year. 

"The rioting in Petrograd increased, and even in 
my bed I could hear echoes of it around the palace. 
Shots I heard and horrid yells. I tried to get out 
of bed, but the Empress soothed me. 'It is bad, of 

129 



130 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



course/ she said, 'but it will quiet soon. The poor 
people are mad with hunger. They will be given 
food and then all this will be over/ Soon the palace 
guards, the regiments on duty in Tsarskoe Selo, be- 
gan to show signs of demoralization. They were 
afraid for their own lives, and you cannot wonder 
that they were. The Empress used to go out in the 
cold and snow in the dead of night and talk to the 
men, reassure them, comfort them. 'Nothing will 
happen/ she told them. But for her I believe the 
last man would have thrown away his gun and fled. 
Her will and her resolution alone kept them at their 
posts." 

"Do you think that the Empress really believed 
that it was a riot and not a revolution?" I asked. 
It was history this woman was telling me, history 
that will live in libraries a thousand years after we 
two, and all of us, are dust. I wanted to know the 
exact truth. 

"I am sure she did," said Mme. Virubova. "If 
she had dreamed that it was a revolution she would 
have sent earlier for the Emperor, who, you know, 
was at the front with his army. She was alone and 
she faced the trouble alone, but if she had known the 
full extent of the trouble she would have wanted the 
Emperor where he would be safer than out there 
among that murderous gang. She did not know 
that Russia was in revolution, nor would she believe 
it at first when she was told that the army had gone 
over to the revolutionists. The officers of the guard 
told her, but she simply shook her head. Finally, 
Grand Duke Paul came tearing out to Tsarskoe in 
his highest power motor car. He convinced her that 



THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 131 



it was true. Even then her steel nerves endured. 
'Send for the Emperor,' she said calmly and sternly. 
T am going back to my sick children.' And she 
went." 

The iron nerve displayed by the Empress of Rus- 
sia when she learned that supreme disaster had be- 
fallen the house of Romanoff was in contrast to the 
emotion which overcame the deposed Emperor on 
his return to Tsarskoe Selo. At the time of his 
abdication, near the army front, he had behaved 
with dignity and self-command. He scornfully re- 
fused the whispered suggestion of one general that 
he escape in one of the high-power motor cars 
which always accompanied the imperial train. If 
the people wanted him to abdicate, he was ready to 
do so, and ready also to place himself at their dis- 
posal. Nicholas also showed himself to be a good 
Russian and no tool of the pro-German party, if re- 
ports are correct. When the news came that the 
army had gone over to the revolution some one near 
the Emperor, it is said, told him that there was one 
desperate way to avert the catastrophe. He could 
open up the Dvinsk front, let the enemy in, and thus 
by the sacrifice of his country save his dynasty. 
Nicholas refused even to consider such a crime. 
He committed many sins of cruelty in his time, and 
many more sins of stupidity. But in the end he 
showed himself no traitor. His return to Tsarskoe 
Selo was intended by Kerensky and the other mem- 
bers of the provisional government to be in accord- 
ance with his former rank, and orders were given to 
treat him with all respect and consideration. These 
orders, if Mme. Virubova is to be believed, were 



i 3 2 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



disregarded by the soldiers on guard at the Alexan- 
der palace, the home of the royal family. 

In my last talk with Mme. Virubova she spoke 
with deep feeling of the rowdy reception given the 
returning Nicholas. "They blew tobacco smoke in 
his face, the brutes!" she said. "A soldier grabbed 
him by the arm and pulled one way, while others 
clutched him on the other side and pulled him in an 
opposite direction. They jeered at him and laughed 
at his anger and pain. When he was finally alone 
with his family and intimate friends he could not 
contain his grief but wept unrestrainedly. We all 
wept, for that matter: we who loved him." 

It is to the credit of Kerensky and the minis- 
ters that they never would consent to any sugges- 
tion that Nicholas be thrown into a dungeon or 
otherwise harshly treated. As long as the family 
remained at Tsarskoe Selo, which was until the ist 
of August, Russian style, and August 13 in the west- 
ern calendar, it lived in its accustomed manner. 
The servants, most of them, remained at their 
posts, and while no member of the family was al- 
lowed to leave the palace grounds on any pretext, 
nor the palace itself except when accompanied by 
armed guards, they had the freedom of their home 
and the society of a few friends. They were not 
allowed to telephone, and all letters reaching them 
had first to be read by the officer in command of the 
guards. Mme. Virubova told me that in spite of 
Kerensky's good intentions, the deposed royalties 
were subjected to a number of petty annoyances 
which must have caused them all the resentment and 
humiliation their tormentors intended. The electric 



THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 133 



lights were sometimes turned off early in the eve- 
ning, leaving the palace in darkness. There were 
days when the water was turned off and the family 
was deprived of bathing facilities. The soldiers 
on guard were not infrequently rude and churlish 
and openly exultant in the presence of their pris- 
oners. 

KerensKy cannot be held responsible for these 
things, but he was responsible for depriving the 
former Empress of the society of her most intimate 
friend, Mme. Virubova. I have already told how 
she was arrested while still suffering from the effects 
of measles and thrown into a cell in Peter and Paul. 
The cell was damp and insanitary, and the sick 
woman suffered extreme misery all the time she 
was there. Surrounded constantly by soldiers, who 
watched her night and day, she was never alone even 
long enough to dress or to bathe. She is lame, as 
I have stated, and once she fell on the slippery floor 
of her cell and was unable for a long time to rise. 
The soldiers on guard refused to help her, but sim- 
ply stood and laughed at her efforts to reach her bed. 
"Twice during the months of my confinement they 
let my mother visit me," she told me. "But I was 
allowed to talk to her only in presence of the guard 
and across a wide table in the governor's room." 

A friend of Mme. Virubova told me a still 
worse story concerning her imprisonment. Several 
times her father was visited by soldiers from Peter 
and Paul and made to pay large sums of money in 
order to insure his daughter from the most horrible 
indignities at the hands of the men who guarded her. 
He paid this blackmail. He had to. There was no 



134 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



power in Russia to appeal to, and Kerensky himself 
could not have prevented the murder or outrage of 
that lame and helpless woman in the fortress of 
Peter and Paul. She escaped the last insult men are 
capable of offering to women, and the government, 
after vainly trying to fasten the crime of treason on 
her, set Anna Virubova free under military sur- 
veillance. But they would not grant the Empress's 
plea to send her friend back to Tsarskoe Selo. 

The first shock of dumbfounded amazement over, 
the royal family, which had never believed that it 
could be overthrown, regained its composure and 
accepted its destiny with quiet resignation. The Em- 
peror became his adored son's tutor, and the Em- 
press her daughters' constant companion. When 
spring came the whole family went out and made a 
garden. The hundreds of soldiers in Tsarskoe and 
thousands of people from Petrograd made pilgrim- 
ages to the palace grounds and watched through the 
high iron fence the former Czar spading up the 
ground and the former heir and his sisters planting 
and hoeing potatoes. The former Empress, in a 
wheeled chair or low pony carriage, for she was in 
feeble health, usually looked on smilingly. 

Of course, the Tavarishi, or at least the extrem- 
ists in the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Dele- 
gates, resented the respectful and considerate treat- 
ment accorded the captive royalties. They kept up 
a constant clamor for the removal of the Emperor 
and Empress to some dungeon in Kronstadt or Peter 
and Paul. Every once in a while the newspapers 
published a resolution to that effect passed by a com- 
mittee of the council in Petrograd or Tsarskoe, or in 



THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 135 



a city more remote. A dispatch from Helsingfors 
said that the crews of three warships lying near 
there had passed fiery resolutions demanding that 
the Czar be turned over to the tender mercies of the 
ruffians at Kronstadt. The crew of the cruiser Gan- 
goute went on record as saying: "This is the third 
time that we have expressed our will in this mat- 
ter, and we have not been trifling. This is our last 
resolution. Next we shall employ force." 

The government, however, disregarded all these 
resolutions and muttered threats. It may very well 
be, though, that the final decision to send Nicholas 
and his wife into Siberian exile came as a result of 
pressure on the part of the Soviets. Kerensky may 
have feared a bloody tragedy at Tsarskoe Selo, and 
perhaps he had reason to fear it. At all events, the 
provisional government decided, some time in July, 
to transfer the family to one of the remotest spots 
in the empire, Tobolsk, in Eastern Siberia. The 
government kept this decision an absolute secret, as 
far as the deposed Emperor as well as the general 
public were concerned. A few days before the trans- 
fer was made one of the Soviets, I think at Tsars- 
koe, held a stormy meeting at which great indigna- 
tion was expressed over the ease and comfort in 
which the once royal family lived. "We eat black 
bread, they eat white," complained one impassioned 
orator. "We drink cold water and Nicholas drinks 
wine. My wife walks while his rides in a carriage. 
Where's the justice in that?" 

Doesn't it sound like a deliberate plagiarism of 
one of the speeches made against allowing the six- 
teenth Louis to remain in the Tuileries? A lot of 



136 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



things have changed since the French revolution, 
but some human nature is just as small and mean as 
ever. 

It was not until the Romanoff family was well on 
its way to Siberia that the transfer was mentioned in 
the newspapers. Many people knew of it, of course, 
and the news was passed from excited lip to lip in 
the capital a few hours after the special train left 
Tsarskoe Selo. In the newspapers of August 3 (16, 
old style) the carefully censored story of the depar- 
ture was published. The full story, as far as I know 
it, reveals that for three weeks beforehand the gar- 
rison at Tsarskoe knew, or suspected, that something 
was about to happen to the captives. Two days be- 
fore the event Kerensky went in person to the garri- 
son and asked the soldiers to choose from their ranks 
a squadron of the most reliable and trustworthy men. 
They were needed, he explained, for a mission of 
great importance. Three hundred and eighty-four 
men were chosen, eight from forty-eight regimental 
groups. On the 31st of July (August 12) at mid- 
night Kerensky appeared at the barrack, called the 
picked men together and told them that their mis- 
sion was to escort the man who had been their em- 
peror and autocrat into exile in far Siberia. 

The royal family knew its fate before that time, 
but just when they were told has not been revealed. 
Kerensky told them, and I feel sure that he did it 
gently and courteously. But he refused them all in- 
formation as to where they were going. On July 
30 (August 11) the confessor of the family held a 
service for those about to go on a long journey. 
Then they went to work to pack trunks and to choose 



THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 137 



among clothes, trinkets, furs, personal belongings, 
books, ikons, rugs and other essential things that 
would lighten exile and keep them in memory of 
other days. It is said that neither Nicholas nor 
Alexandra slept on the night before their departure, 
but wandered from room to room, hand in hand, 
mutely and sorrowfully bidding their beloved home 
good-by. Many others in Tsarskoe Selo refrained 
from sleep on that night. The garrison was wildly 
excited, and the streets of the picturesque little town 
were full of people. At 3 o'clock in the morning mo- 
tor vans were driven into the palace grounds, and 
those near enough the gates could see that the vans 
were being loaded with trunks and boxes. At 6 
o'clock a long train slowly backed into the station of 
Tsarskoe Selo, the station was surrounded by sol- 
diers, and troops with loaded rifles marched out and 
lined both sides of the road from the palace to the 
station, each soldier carrying in his belt sixty rounds 
of cartridges. 

Those who saw the departure differ in minor de- 
tails, of course, because no two people ever see the 
same event exactly alike. Especially an important 
event on which we would like to have all the details. 
But all the observers agree that Nicholas walked out 
of the palace and entered the waiting motor car with 
the calm manner of a man about to take a pleasure 
drive. Alexandra did the same. She walked with- 
out assistance, having apparently recovered her shat- 
tered health. The former Czarevitch, in a sailor 
suit and cap, danced ahead of his parents, in pleased 
anticipation of a journey, and the young grand duch- 
esses also appeared in high spirits. They are ex- 



138 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



tremely handsome girls, all of them, and people 
rather sympathetically observed that during their 
illness in February they had all had their luxuriant 
hair cut short. 

Some of the observers say that the former Czar 
drove to the station alone, others say Kerensky fol- 
lowed him into the car and still others say that the 
family went together. Some say that Nicholas wore 
the uniform of a Russian army officer, others par- 
ticularly noticed his gray suit. To some he looked 
dejected and tearful, and to others careless and cold. 
Some saw tears in his eyes when he entered the train, 
others marveled at the calmness with which he shook 
hands with members of the provisional government 
who were on the platform. To this day we do not 
know whether Louis XVI. laid his head on the block 
quietly or fought the headsman all over the place, al- 
though several thousand Frenchmen witnessed the 
execution. 

It is said that the Emperor left Tsarskoe under 
the impression that he was being taken to Livadia, 
the beautiful Crimean estate toward which he 
yearned at the time of his abdication. He must have 
been profoundly shocked when he learned that in- 
stead he was speeding toward one of the bleakest and 
dreariest spots in Siberia. Before the train left the 
Emperor is said to have asked Kerensky, who accom- 
panied him to the last, if the family would ever be 
allowed to return to Tsarskoe Selo. If he did, 
Kerensky' s reply must have been evasive, for Nicho- 
las told one of his suite, or is said to have done so, 
that he expected to return after the war. 

The Empress, when told that the family was on 



THE PASSING OF THE ROMANOFFS 139 



its way to Tobolsk, is reputed to have smiled coldly 
and said: "I am glad we shall see Tobolsk. It is a 
place that has dear associations." Tobolsk, or its 
near neighborhood, it will be remembered, was the 
early home of Rasputin. Women of the French 
aristocracy mounted the guillotine with exactly such 
speeches on their lips, a last defiance of the mob. 

"Why are there so many soldiers on this train?" 
asked one of the young grand duchesses. She was 
used to being escorted by soldiers, but the great 
number on this occasion excited her surprise. The 
children all knew that they were going into exile, 
and had been given their choice of remaining with 
relatives or going with their parents. Mme. Viru- 
bova's claim that the family bond is strong was 
borne out by their unanimous decision to go wher- 
ever their father and mother went. 

Mme. Narychkine, one of the empress's faithful 
ladies in waiting, went with her, since the provisional 
government would not let her have Mme. Viru- 
bova or even allow the two friends to bid each other 
farewell. Prince Dolgorouki was permitted to go 
with the Emperor. The children retained a gov- 
erness and the boy a tutor. Twelve servants accom- 
panied the family. 

According to the depths of his nature and under- 
standing, one feels a certain pity for the former au- 
tocrat of all the Russias, or rejoices wildly at his 
present plight. He had to be exiled, and perhaps 
Siberia was the best place to send him. But Siberia 
has a large variety of climates and places to choose 
among, and it seems to many people that the provi- 
sional government might have been a little more hu- 



HO INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

mane in their choice of a residence for Nicholas 
and his family. Whatever his shortcomings, how- 
ever just his punishment, his five children never 
harmed anybody, and they deserve no punishment. 
According to accounts, every hour they spend at To- 
bolsk will be a punishment, and their time there will 
be short, because all of them will probably die owing 
to the frightful surroundings. 

Tobolsk is a town of about 25,000 inhabitants, 
situated on the Irtish river, a little sluggish stream 
that drains, or partially drains one of the great 
marshes of eastern Siberia. The town is built on a 
marsh, and the mosquitoes which breed there are 
said to be of a size and a ferocity unequaled else- 
where. Malaria haunts the miasmas of the marshy 
forests that stretch for miles around the town and 
line the river banks. The nearest railroad is 300 
versts distant. In winter, which endures eight 
months of the year, the place is shut off from the 
world. It is as remote from human association as 
the moon. The provisional government apologizes 
for Tobolsk as a choice on the ground of the ne- 
cessity for remoteness. 



CHAPTER XV 



THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 

On the afternoon of the day when Nicholas II., 
deposed emperor and autocrat of all the Russias, 
with his wife and children left Tsarskoe Selo and 
began the long journey toward their place of exile 
in Siberia, I sat in a peaceful convent room in Mos- 
cow and talked with almost the last remaining mem- 
ber of the royal family left in complete freedom in 
the empire. This was Elisabeta Feodorovna, sister 
of the former empress and widow of the Grand 
Duke Serge, uncle of the emperor. The Grand 
Duke Serge was assassinated, blown to pieces by a 
bomb, almost before the eyes of his wife, by a revo- 
lutionist on February 4 old style, 1905. He was 
killed when going to join the Grand Duchess in one 
of the churches of the Kremlin in Moscow. She 
rushed out and saw his mutilated remains lying in 
the snow. The Grand Duchess Serge had long been 
known as a noble and saintly woman, and her con- 
duct following the horrible death of her husband 
perfectly illustrates her character. She besought the 
Czar to commute the death sentence passed upon the 
assassin, and when he refused she went to the prison 
where the wretched man waited his death, gained 
admission to his cell, and almost to the end prayed 
with him and comforted him. No children had ever 

141 



i 4 2 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

been born to her, and after the event which cut the 
last tie that bound her to the life of royal pomp 
and glitter she retired from society and gave herself 
up to religion. As soon as possible she became a 
nun. Her private fortune, to the last rouble, invest- 
ments, palaces, furniture, art treasures, jewels, mo- 
tor cars, sables and other fine raiment were turned 
into cash and the money used to build a convent 
and to found an order of which she became the lady 
abbess. The Grand Duchess Serge literally obeyed 
the edict of Christ to the rich young man: "Sell all 
thou hast and give it to the poor." 

The Convent of Mary and Martha, of the Order 
of Mercy in Moscow, is a living token of her great 
sacrifice. Here for the past eight years she has 
lived and worked among her nuns, at least one of 
whom was a court lady, and many of whom are 
women from the intellectual classes. Some of the 
nuns were from humble households, for the order 
is perfectly democratic. Every one who enters the 
House of Mary and Martha does so with the un- 
derstanding that her life is to be spent in service, 
spiritual service such as Mary of the Gospels gave, 
and material service such as the practical Martha 
rendered her Lord. The somewhat dreamy and 
passive Russians will tell you that Elisabeta Feodo- 
rovna's convent is one of the most efficient institu- 
tions in the empire, and they usually add: "They 
say she makes her nuns work terribly hard." 

When the days of revolution came, in February, 
19 17, a great mob went to the House of Mary and 
Martha, battered the gates open and swarmed up 
the convent steps demanding admission. The door 




Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, 



THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 143 



opened and a tall, grave woman in a pale silver- 
gray habit and white veil stepped out into the porch 
and asked the mob what it wanted. 

"We want that German woman, that sister of the 
German spy in Tsarskoe Selo," yelled the mob. 
"We want the Grand Duchess Serge." 

Tall and white, like a lily, the woman stood there. 
"I am the Grand Duchess Serge," she replied in a 
clear voice that floated above the clamor. "What 
do you want with me?" 

"We have come to arrest you," they shouted. 

"Very well," was the calm reply. "If you want 
to arrest me I shall have to go with you, of course. 
But I have a rule that before I leave the convent for 
any purpose I always go into the church and pray. 
Come with me into the church, and after I have 
prayed I will go with you." 

She turned and walked across the garden to the 
church, the mob following. As many as could crowd 
into the small building followed her there. Before 
the altar door she knelt, and her nuns came and 
knelt around her weeping. The Grand Duchess did 
not weep. She prayed for a moment, crossed her- 
self, then stood up and stretched her hands to the 
silent, staring mob. 

"I am ready to go now," she said. 

But not a hand was lifted to take Elisabeta Feo- 
dorovna. What Kerensky could not have done, 
what no police force in Russia could have done with 
those men that day, her perfect courage and humil- 
ity did. It cowed and conquered hostility, it dis- 
persed the mob. That great crowd of liberty-drunk, 
blood-mad men went quietly home, leaving a guard 



144 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



to protect the convent. It is probably the only 
spot in Russia to-day where absolute inviolability 
may be said to exist for any members of the hated 
"bourju," as the Bolsheviki call the intellectual 
classes. 

On the August day when I rang the bell of the 
convent's massive brown gate I did not really know 
that I was to see and speak with the grand duchess. 
Mr. William L. Cazalet, of Moscow, the friend 
who took me there, doubted very much whether I 
could be received thus informally, without a previ- 
ous appointment. The gravity of the times, and es- 
pecially the situation of the Romanoff family, placed 
the Grand Duchess Serge in a position of extreme 
delicacy, and Mr. Cazalet said frankly that he ex- 
pected to find her living in strict retirement. The 
best he could promise, he said, was that I should see 
the convent, where one of his young cousins was a 
nun. 

The convent, which is situated in the heart of 
Moscow, is a group of white stone and stucco houses 
built around an old garden and surrounded by a high 
white wall, over which vines and foliage ramble and 
fall. A key turned, the brown gate swung open to 
our ring and we stepped into a garden running over 
with the richest bloom. I remember the pink and 
white sweet-peas against the wall, the white ma- 
donna lilies that nodded below and the carpet of 
gay verbenas that ran along the pathway to the con- 
vent door. There were many old apple trees and a 
forest of lilacs, purple and white. 

In her small room, combination of office and 
living room, we were received by the executive 



THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 145 



head of the convent, Mme. Gardeeve, for many 
years the intimate friend of Elisabeta Feodorovna. 
Like the grand duchess she had had a life full of 
tears and tribulation, in spite of her rank and 
wealth, and when the grand duchess took the veil 
she followed her example and became a nun. The 
business of the convent is transacted under her 
direction, and most ably, I was told. Efficiency and 
ability are written in every feature of Mme. Gar- 
deeve's fine face, in her crisp, clear voice and quick 
though graceful movements. Her enunciation was 
a joy to hear, an especial joy to me, for I have diffi- 
culty in understanding the rather indistinct French 
spoken by the average Russian. Mme. Gardeeve's 
French was of that perfect kind you hear spoken 
in Tours more often than in Paris or elsewhere. I 
understood every word. Woman of the world to 
her finger tips, Mme. Gardeeve wore the pictur- 
esque habit of the order with the same grace that 
she would have worn the latest creation of the 
ateliers. She smiled and chatted with Mr. Cazalet, 
who is very well known in the convent, and was 
most kind and cordial to me. After a few minutes' 
conversation my friend said to her that I had told 
him some extremely interesting things about public 
schools in America, and he wanted me to repeat 
them to her. 

So I told her something about the extraordinary 
experiments that have been worked out in Gary, 
Indiana, and the work that was being done in New 
York and elsewhere to give children, rich and poor 
alike, the complete education they merit. As I 
talked she exclaimed from time to time: "But it is 



146 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



excellent ! I find it admirable ! The Grand Duchess 
should hear of this!" 

I said hopefully that I would like very much to 
meet the Grand Duchess and she replied she thought 
it might be arranged. Not to-day, however, as the 
Grand Duchess's time was completely filled. How 
long did I expect to remain in Moscow? A week? 
It could certainly be arranged, she thought. Mean- 
while what would I like to see of the convent? 
Everything? She laughed and touched a little bell 
on the desk beside her. A little nun appeared and 
Mme. Gardeeve handed me over to her with orders 
that I was to see everything. 

I saw a small but perfectly equipped hospital, 
with an operating room complete in all its details. 
The hospital had been devoted to poor women and 
children before the war. Now most of the wards 
are filled with wounded soldiers. I saw a room 
filled with blinded soldiers who were being taught 
to read Braille type by sweet-faced nuns. Blindness 
is bitter hard for any man, but for illiterates it must 
be blank despair. I saw a house full of refugee nuns 
from the invaded districts of Poland. I saw an 
orphanage full of slain soldiers' children. I lin- 
gered long in the lovely garden where nuns were 
at work, some with their habits tucked up, among 
the potato rows, some pruning trees and hedges, 
some sweeping the gravel paths with besoms made 
of twigs, some teaching the orphan girls to embroi- 
der at big frames, to knit and to sew. They made a 
fascinating picture, and I could hardly leave them 
even to see the church, which is one of the most 
beautiful small gems of architecture to be found 



THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 147 



in Europe. I never really saw that church at all, 
as it turned out, for just as we entered and I was 
getting a first impression of its blue and white and 
gold beauty, a messenger hastily opened the door 
and said that the Grand Duchess wanted to see me. 

We went back to the convent and I was taken 
to a tiny parlor, which is the private retreat of the 
Lady Abbess. It is not much bigger than a hall bed- 
room, and it gave the same general impression of 
blue and white and gold that one sees throughout 
the place. There were many books bound in the 
lapis blue which seems to be the Grand Duchess's 
favorite color; a few pictures, mostly of the 
Madonna and Child; some small tables, one with 
Stephen Graham's book, "The House of Mary and 
Martha," held open upon it by a piece of embroi- 
dery carelessly dropped. There were easy chairs 
of English willow with blue cushions, and a business- 
like little desk crammed with papers. Everywhere, 
in the window, on tables and the desk, were bowls 
and vases of flowers. Every room in the place, in 
fact, was filled with flowers. 

The door opened and the Grand Duchess came 
in with a radiant smile of welcome and a white 
hand outstretched. "I am so glad to find that I 
had time to meet you to-day, Mrs. Dorr," she said, 
in a rarely sweet voice. 

"Your highness speaks English?" I exclaimed in 
surprise, and she replied, waving me to a comfort- 
able armchair: "Why not? My mother was 
English." 

I had forgotten for the moment that the Grand 
Duchess and her younger sister, the former Empress 



i 4 8 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

of Russia, were daughters of the Princess Alice of 
England and granddaughters of Queen Victoria. 
Russia seemed to have forgotten it also and to have 
remembered only that the father of these women 
was the Grank Duke of Hesse and the Rhine. The 
Grand Duchess added when we were seated that 
when she was a child at home they always spoke 
English to their mother, if German to their father. 
"I welcome an opportunity to speak English, be- 
cause if one is wholly Russian, as I am, and espe- 
cially if one is orthodox, he hears little except Rus- 
sian or French." Then she said, with another ra- 
diant smile: u Tell me what you think of my con- 
vent." 

I told her that I felt as though I had stepped 
back into the glowing and romantic thirteenth cen- 
tury. 

"That is just what I wanted my convent to be," 
she replied, "one of those busy, useful medieval 
types. Such convents were wonderfully efficient 
aids to civilization in the middle ages, and I don't 
think they should have been allowed to disappear. 
Russia needs them, certainly, the kind of convent 
that fills the place between the austere, enclosed or- 
ders and the life of the outside world. We read the 
newspapers here, we keep track of events and we 
receive and consult with people in active life. We 
are Marys, but we are Marthas as well." 

The Grand Duchess's interest in the outside world 
is patent. She asked me eagerly to tell her how 
things were going in Petrograd, and her face sad- 
dened when I told her of the riotous and bloody 
events I had witnessed during the days of the July 



THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 149 



revolution, scarcely past. "Times are very bad 
with us just now," she said, "but they will improve 
soon, I am sure. The Russian people are good and 
kind at heart, but they are mostly children — big, 
ignorant, impulsive children. If they can find good 
leaders, and if they will only realize that they must 
obey their leaders, they will emerge from this dread- 
ful chaos and build up a strong, new Russia. Have 
you seen Kerensky, and what do you think of him?" 

I replied rather cautiously. Like every one else, 
I still hoped that Kerensky would succeed in getting 
his released giant back into its bottle, and I did not 
want to unsettle any one's confidence in him even to 
the extent of an expressed doubt. Kerensky, I told 
her, was greatly admired and liked, and I hoped he 
might prove the strong leader Russia needed in her 
trouble. 

"I hope so," replied the last of the Romanoffs, 
"I pray for him every day." 

The bells of the little church chimed the hour 
softly, and the Grand Duchess paused to cross her- 
self devoutly. "I want to hear about those wonder- 
ful public schools of yours," she said, "but first tell 
me what America is doing in war preparation." 

As I talked she listened, nodding and smiling as if 
immensely pleased. The great airplane fleet in course 
of construction seemed to amaze and delight her, 
and when I told her of the conservation of the food 
supply and the restriction of the manufacture of 
alcohol she fairly glowed. "America is simply stu- 
pendous," she exclaimed. "How I regret that I 
never went there. Of course I never shall now. 
To me the United States stands for order and effi- 



150 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

ciency of the best kind. The kind of order only 
a free people can create. The kind I pray may be 
built some day here in Russia." And then she made 
her one allusion to the deposed Czar. I did not 
know that at that minute the Czar was on his way 
to Siberia, but it is very probable that she knew it. 
She said: "I am glad you are going to protect your 
soldiers from the danger of the drink evil. Nobody 
can possibly know how much good the abolition of 
vodka did our soldiers and all our people. I think 
history should give the Emperor credit for his share 
in that act, don't you?" I agreed that the Emperor 
should receive full credit for what he did, and I 
spoke with all sincerity. 

Elisabeta Feodorovna kept me for nearly three- 
quarters of an hour talking to her about the Gary 
schools, which she is eager to see in Russia; about 
American women and their part in the war, and 
about welfare work for children, especially for 
tubercular and anemic children. "It is wonderful," 
she said with a sigh. "I can scarcely help envying 
you sinfully. Think of a great, young, hurrying 
nation that can still find time to study all these 
frightful problems of poverty and disease, and to 
grapple with them. I hope you will go on doing 
that, and still find more and more ways of bringing 
beauty into the lives of the workers. How can you 
expect workmen who toil all day in hot, hideous 
factories or on remote farms, with nothing in their 
lives but work and worry, to have beauty in their 
souls?" 

She wanted eagerly to know about the women 
soldiers, and said that she greatly admired their 




The Grand Duchess Elizabeta Feodorovna, sister of the late Czarina, 
and widow of the Grand Duke Serge (who was assassinated 
during the Revolution of 1905), now Abbess of the 
House of Mary and Martha at Moscow. 



THE HOUSE OF MARY AND MARTHA 151 

heroism. What was their life in camp like, and 
were they strong enough to stand the hardships? 
The Grand Duchess Serge is a good feminist and 
she agreed with me that in Russia's crisis, as in the 
situation in all countries created by the war, it had 
been completely demonstrated that women would 
have henceforth to play a role equally important 
and equally prominent as that of men. 

They would have to share equally with men in 
the successful operation of the war whether on the 
battlefield or behind the lines. She had always had 
a special devotion to Jeanne d'Arc and believed her 
to have been inspired by God. Other women also 
had been called of God to do great things. 

"I am glad you like my convent," she repeated as 
we parted. "Please come again. You know that 
it does not belong to me any more, but to the Pro- 
visional Government, but I hope they will let me 
keep it." 

I hope they will. The House of Mary and Mar- 
tha, with the beautiful woman in it, is one of the 
things new Russia can least afford to lose. 



• 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 

The Romanoffs gone, the Soviets apparently 
yielding to Kerensky's demand for a coalition gov- 
ernment, and finally voting to give him almost 
supreme power, what then stood in the way of re- 
storing order in the army and civil life? Readers 
of the despatches in the daily press last September 
and later must have puzzled over this question. The 
fact is that while there were indications that the 
last convention held in Petrograd by the Russian 
Socialists, the so-called Democratic Council, ended 
in a partial victory for Kerensky, there remained 
every evidence that the Bolshevik element was still 
very strong. Kerensky succeeded in forming a coal- 
ition ministry, but the Petrograd Council of Soldiers' 
and Workmen's Delegates at the same time succeed- 
ed in electing a Bolshevik central executive com- 
mittee with the notorious Leo Trotzky as chair- 
man, displacing N. C. Tcheidse, the Georgian 
Duma member, prominent in the Council, but 
against whose sincerity and honesty I never heard a 
word. 

Trotzky was elected because the Bolsheviki 
couldn't then get Lenine back. There were not 
enough bold spirits in the Democratic Council to 
force from the government a promise of immunity 

152 



THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 



from arrest for Lenine, should he appear at a meet- 
ing, so he was kept in the background and Trotzky 
was made chairman of the Petrograd executive com- 
mittee in his stead. 

Lenine is the real leader of the Bolsheviki to- 
day, exactly as he was during the fateful days of 
July when he sent mutinous soldiers and idle work- 
men out on the streets of the capital with machine 
guns to murder the populace. Trotzky, however, 
is an able and faithful lieutenant. He is a Jew and 
his real name is Braunstein. He is one of those 
Jews, unhappily too prominent in Russian affairs 
just now, who are doing everything in their power 
to prejudice the people of Russia against the race, 
and to check the movement for the full freedom of 
the Jews of the empire. 

Trotzky, or Braunstein, is known to many in New 
York city. He gained some newspaper publicity 
when he arrived in New York from Spain a short 
time before the February revolution. He posed 
as a martyr to socialist principles, one who had been 
persecuted by the governments of four countries — 
Russia, Germany, France and Spain. All four had 
expelled him, he said, for the crime of editing really 
successful socialist newspapers. Trotzky's story was 
founded on fact. At least, four countries did find 
him as a citizen too undesirable to retain. Banish- 
ment from Russia, under the old regime, is no 
stigma, so we may begin Trotzky's saga in August, 
1 9 14, the early days of the world war. He 
was editing a Jewish paper in Berlin. He was given 
a few hours to leave, he says, and with his family 
fled across the Swiss frontier to Zurich. From there 



154 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION v 



he went to Paris, where he was miraculously able, 
poor as he had always been and high as the price of 
white paper was soaring, to establish a socialist 
newspaper in the Russian language. When the Rus- 
sian contingent of the allied armies reached France 
in April, 191 6, Our Words, which was the name 
of Trotzky's spicy little sheet, was circulated free 
among the 65,000 soldiers. The motto of the paper 
was "Down with the War" far more than it was 
"Up with Socialism." It was filled from page one 
to page four with the sort of pro-German stuff that 
has done its deadly work with the men at the Russian 
front, inducing them to refuse to fight and thus open- 
ing their country to the German army. 

The French government, which had its hands full 
with its own pet sedition raisers, had never before 
heard of Trotzky, but now it told him to move on. 
He did. He went to Spain, where he was arrested 
as an extreme trouble-maker, and after a short time 
expelled from the country. He came to the United 
States, where he remained until the Russian revolu- 
tion of late February, 19 17, when he flew back to 
Petrograd. Trotzky always had money to make 
these long journeys. At Halifax he was halted, for 
the English government knew his record. The Eng- 
lish authorities considered interning him for the du- 
ration of the war, but a lot of people interceded for 
the poor Russian exile, and he was allowed to go on 
to Russia. Poor Russia! 

Trotzky was elected a member of the Petrograd 
Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates, be- 
ing a pacifist and never having done any manual 
work. Last summer when I was in Russia I used to 



THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 



read almost daily in the accounts of the National 
Council of Soviets, or councils, burning speeches of 
Trotzky's in which he urged a separate peace with 
Germany, or what would amount to exactly the same 
thing, Russia's immediate cessation of fighting. 
Trotzky ridiculed the idea that abandonment of the 
allies would in any way injure Russia in a material 
way or soil the national honor. His ideas of eco- 
nomics and finance were simply and frequently reiter- 
ated. Arrest all capitalists and force them to dis- 
close the secret of how they got rich, and hang all 
the bankers — presumably as the first step toward 
seizing the contents of the banks. With this man 
as chairman of the central executive committee of 
the Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' 
Council, and with the October revolt of the German 
naval men on five ships for him to point to as evi- 
dence that the social revolution is at hand in Ger- 
many, the life of the last coalition government was 
not likely to be peaceful. 

But the end of the Bolsheviki is in sight in spite 
of Lenine, Trotzky and the entire majority in the 
Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates. It 
has been coming on stealthy feet for many months, 
and now the messengers' hands are on the latch. 
The messengers' names are Hunger and Cold. 

When I went down to my first dinner in Petro- 
grad last May, I was amazed to see the price on 
the menu card placed at five rubles fifty kopecks, 
about $1.80. In a previous visit to Petrograd I had 
eaten an excellent dinner in this same hotel and had 
paid for it one ruble seventy-five kopecks, or about 
seventy-five cents, as the ruble was then valued. The 



156 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

one offered for more than twice this amount con- 
sisted of a watery soup, a small piece of not very 
fresh fish, a thin slice of veal with peas and a water 
ice flavored with cherry juice. One piece of black 
bread without butter was served. If I wanted water 
to drink with the meal I had to pay two rubles for 
bottled water, for one drink of plain water in Petro- 
grad is an attempt at suicide by the typhoid route. 
If I wanted coffee I had to pay one ruble sixty-five 
kopecks more, and after I added the customary 10 
per cent, for the tip my check was ten rubles and six 
kopecks. Three dollars and thirty-five cents. 

This was bad enough, but before I left Russia 
the price of that meager meal had advanced to thir- 
teen rubles and the quality of the dinner had sensibly 
declined. Also the tip had advanced, for after a 
strike of waiters a system was adopted all over Rus- 
sia, as far as I traveled, whereby tips were abolished 
and 15 per cent, was added to the bill by the hotel 
and restaurant proprietors. 

You now pay an additional 15 per cent, of your 
entire hotel bill in Russia, which is distributed in 
tips to all the servants except the lift boys and the 
gorgeous individual who stands in front of the hotel 
door, who assists you to alight from your droshky 
when you arrive, and touches his peacock feather 
trimmed hat to you when you go in and out. He is 
called the Swiss, denoting the origin of his earliest 
predecessor, I imagine, and why he and the elevator 
men do not share in the general distribution I never 
found out. 

Walk down the Nevsky Prospect, or the Grand 
Morskaia, which begins in fine shops and ends in 



THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 157 



palaces, like Fifth avenue. Wander through the 
maze of little shops in the huge arcade called the 
Gostinny Dvor. Go far out on the Nevsky, cross 
the beautiful Anitchkoff bridge, with its four groups 
of rearing horses, and turn in at the Litainy, where 
the cheaper shops are to be found, and try to buy 
something. It doesn't matter what, just try to buy 
something to eat, drink, wear or use. When the 
waiter brought in the coffee that morning he said 
cheerfully, "Niet malako," no milk. Try to buy a 
few cans of condensed milk against a similar expe- 
rience. I walked all over Petrograd trying to buy 
condensed milk, for the shortage of fresh milk was 
grave when I arrived, and grew steadily worse. I 
found one can, for which I paid two dollars. Shortly 
afterward a friend arrived from Japan and gave 
me two cans, which she spared out of her store. 

Russian illiteracy is so general that the shop signs 
are not written but illustrated. Brilliant signboards 
on the outside show pictures of what the shopkeeper 
has to sell. A dairy shop will have a picture of a 
cow, crocks of butter, chickens, ducks, geese, baskets 
of eggs, cheese of many varieties and so forth. A 
greengrocer's signboard is decorated like a seed 
catalogue cover, while a clothing store is advertised 
by pictures of clothes and hats which were fashion- 
able perhaps ten years ago. It once added to the 
gay appearance of the streets, but just now it in- 
creases their anxious and ominous air. Hundreds 
of the shops are empty, the doors are locked and 
the brilliant signboards alone remain to indicate 
that business was ever conducted there. One of the 
mournfulest sights in Petrograd to me was an aban- 



158 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

doned shop where they once sold French bread and 
pastry. I used to turn my head away from the 
mocking poster, picturing crisp white bread in yard- 
long loaves, delicious breakfast crescents, pates and 
cakes. The standard bread served in Russia at the 
present time is black, soggy, sour and indigestible. 
It is sold by weight, hence loaded with water and 
baked as little as possible to be bread and not dough. 
Some one has suggested that that bread was meant 
for food and drink together, and it is certain that 
it is so wet that it quickly mildews. But bad as it is 
it is scarce and expensive. A bread ticket calls for 
three-quarters of a pound, the daily allotment per 
person when I left the last of August. This costs 
at the rate of ten kopecks a pound. It used to be 
three and a half kopecks a pound, and good bread, 
too. 

Butter, when it can be bought at all, was three 
rubles a pound, about a dollar. Excellent butter a 
year or two ago was less than fifty kopecks a pound, 
for Russia was rapidly becoming a dairy country. 
Veal, and veal is about the only meat to be had, was 
nearly a dollar a pound. Feed for cattle is so scarce 
and so expensive that cows are not allowed to grow 
into beef size, hence the prevalence of veal. Chick- 
ens may vary the menu, if you can afford to pay from 
three dollars upward. You could buy only a short- 
weight half pound of meat a day per person, ex- 
cept for the Sunday dinner, when a pound was al- 
lowed. 

Even at the Hotel Militaire, where I lived most 
of the time, and where the food supply came from 
government sources, we had veal or its derivatives, 



THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 



hash, croquettes, etc., five days in the week. Some- 
times they offered what they called beef, but it 
wasn't. It was horsemeat, coarse and strong. Once 
a week or so we had chicken, a welcome change. 
When August came we began to have game, grouse 
of various kinds mostly. Game is very plentiful in 
Russia and Finland this year, because since the war 
men have hunted only one another. But game, 
which is a treat when you have it occasionally, is a 
punishment when you have it more than once or so 
a week. You detest it when it appears on the table 
three times a week, and if it appears oftener you 
choose a meatless day as an alternative. 

Coffee was about a dollar and a half a pound, not 
so bad, and tea was even more moderate in price. 
What the Russian people would do if the tea gave 
out I cannot imagine. Everybody drinks tea, scald- 
ing hot, several times a day. Even the babies drink 
tea, and it is a fact that in the best babies' hospital 
I saw in Russia the head nurse proudly showed me, 
in a hot water table, a whole row of nursing bottles 
full of tea for the sick babies' evening repast. Tea 
they still have, but they are almost out of sugar to 
go with it. In a hotel or restaurant they serve you 
with three very tiny lumps of sugar with each glass 
fof tea, and that is all you can have. If for any 
reason you do not use all your sugar you put it in 
your pocket. You do this whether you keep house 
or not, because you can't buy much candy, and when 
meat is scarce everybody craves sweets. 

Sugar is not the only leftover one takes home. 
One day I went into the Vienna restaurant on the 
Gogol for dinner, sitting down at a table just va- 



i6o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



cated by a very smart young officer. He left behind 
him on the window ledge a little parcel neatly 
wrapped in white paper with a pink string. It might 
have been a jeweler's parcel. I picked it up with 
the impulse to hand it over to the waiter, but first as 
a matter of precaution, lest it should be really val- 
uable, I opened a corner of the paper and examined 
the contents. A piece of fairly white bread as big 
as a small turnip, the remains of luncheon, perhaps, 
at the house of a rich friend. I went into a fash- 
ionable tea place in Moscow just before I left, and 
they served with the tea, in lieu of sugar, a kind of 
sticky preserve. I had with my sugarless tea a cake 
made without flour or sugar. It tasted like almond 
paste and the whole thing cost me a dollar and ten 
cents. 

Most of the shops are closed, but before most 
of those which remain open you may see, at any 
hour of the day or night, a queue of people, men, 
women and children, waiting to get in and buy. The 
people often wait in line twenty-four hours or more. 
They wait days to buy some things. Go home from 
a visit or get in from a journey at any time of night, 
midnight, three a. m., any hour, and you see these 
long, patient, waiting lines of people. They curl 
up on the stones of the pavement and sleep, mem- 
bers of a family relieve one another at intervals, 
but every one desperately hangs on to his place in 
the line. 

Not only do all the small shop keepers and the 
street peddlers have to replenish their poor little 
stocks by standing thus for days, but housekeepers 
have to feed and clothe their families that way. 



THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE 161 



People who can afford servants, of course, send 
their servants to wait in line. The daily newspapers 
often contain the advertisement, "Wanted a queue 
maid," meaning a woman whose sole duty it is to 
sleep on the sidewalk and bring home next day's 
dinner. 

It was summer when I was in Petrograd and 
Moscow. Sleeping on the sidewalk left something 
to be desired even in warm weather. The first hint 
of autumn was in the air when I left on August 30. 
By the first of October it was cold, and by the end 
of November it was frigid. When the storms 
and the driving snows of winter set in in earnest peo- 
ple will not be able to sleep on the sidewalks. Where 
will they get food, and when starvation stares them 
in the face what will they do? Russia's real crisis, 
political and economic, will come then, and the Bol- 
sheviki will not be the people to overcome it. 



CHAPTER XVII 



GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 

After Napoleon Bonaparte's defeated legions 
had fled from Russia to freeze and starve and die 
by thousands in a frenzied attempt to get back to 
France, the victorious commander of the Russian 
army said that his two greatest aides had been Gen- 
eral January and General February. The relentless 
cold and storm of a Russian winter were foes too 
strong for Bonaparte to conquer. They sent him to 
St. Helena, and the same strong foes this winter are 
going to rout and banish the Bolsheviki. The Rus- 
sian revolution began with a bread riot and it will 
culminate in a bread riot. When the people of Rus- 
sia get hungry enough, they are going to stop talk- 
ing about "no annexations or contributions,' , "all 
the power to the Soviets," and the rest, and demand 
a government that shall govern, and as soon as pos- 
sible put the country back on a normal basis. When 
the thermometer falls to 45 degrees below zero, 
and a fifty-miles-an-hour wind is driving sleet and 
snow in their faces, people can no longer stand 
twenty-four hours in line to buy food for their chil- 
dren. Especially when their clothes are thin and 
worn and their boots are dropping off their feet. 

I have told something about the food situation in 
Russia. The clothing situation and the fuel situa- 

162 



GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 163 



tion are, if anything, worse. If you want to buy a 
pair of shoes in Petrograd you must take two days 
to do it and you must put much money in your purse. 
There is an American shoe store on the Nevsky 
Prospect and every day the line of people trying 
to get in and buy shoes was so great that it blocked 
traffic and the city authorities finally had to close 
the street entrance. The line now forms in a court 
or lane in the rear of the store and the customers 
are admitted, a few at a time, through the back door. 
This American shoe store is very popular because 
the shoes are of excellent quality and the prices are 
regarded as reasonable. A woman can buy a pair of 
boots there as low as $25. Men's shoes are some- 
what dearer. But the stock was running low when 
I was there in the summer, and when it gives out 
I don't see how they are going to replenish it. On 
a corner of the Grand Morskaia there was another 
shoe store, in front of which a crowd stood all day 
long and all night. The queue extended around the 
corner, and I have seen it when it stretched to the 
Moika canal a very long block away. This is a 
store where cheaper shoes were sold. It represented 
an attempt on the part of one of the fleeting minis- 
tries to relieve the shoe shortage. Large quantities 
of shoes and leather were purchased and were then 
being distributed through authorized channels in the 
shop on the Morskaia. 

In order to buy a pair of those shoes a man or a 
woman went there and got a place in line. Each 
stood in line until his or her turn came to be ad- 
mitted to the shop, a long and weary business. 
When he gained admission to the shop and the 



1 64 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

clerk got around to waiting on him he received — a 
pair of shoes? Not a bit of it. He got a ticket 
with a number on it. The ticket entitled the cus- 
tomer to come back at some future date, stand in 
line and claim a pair of shoes which were probably 
at the time being made — provided he could afford to 
pay a minimum of ten dollars for them. 

When I was in Poland with the women soldiers, 
the Botchkareva Battalion of Death, the regiment 
was delayed in its further progress toward the fight- 
ing line by a dearth of boots in which to march. 
About half the women soldiers received boots along 
with their other equipment before they left Petro- 
grad, but the other half wore, with their khaki uni- 
form, the women's shoes, often worn and tattered, 
in which they had enlisted. One day there was great 
rejoicing in the barrack. The boots had come, and 
the rest of the afternoon was spent in sorting out 
from the pile a pair to fit each girl. I was interested 
in those boots, for they were mute but eloquent wit- 
nesses of the poverty of life in Russia. Not a pair 
was new. They were all second-hand, remade and 
mended boots, and I strongly suspect that most of 
them had been taken off the feet of dead soldiers. 
They had, in many cases, new feet or new soles, 
but the majority of them were merely mended and 
patched. Coarse, stiff, malodorous and badly put 
together as these were, the girls were only too glad 
to get them. The Adjutant, Skridlova, and one or 
two of the well-to-do soldiers had their boots made 
to order, and they paid ninety dollars a pair for 
them. Seventy-five dollars for a pair of women's 
boots is not an unheard-of price. 



GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 165 

What is true of boots and shoes is true of almost 
every other clothing commodity. I ran out of gloves 
while I was in Russia, but, after hearing what gloves 
cost in Petrograd, I went without. You could get 
cotton gloves as low as a dollar and eighty cents a 
pair. They were ugly and shapeless, but people 
bought and wore them. If you wanted a pair of 
kid gloves and you knew where you could find them 
and had time, you could buy them for three to five 
dollars. They were the kind that an American de- 
partment store might put on a table in the center 
aisle and sell for fifty cents to attract customers in 
the dull season. A man pays a dollar for a fifteen- 
cent collar in Petrograd. He pays several dollars 
for a decent pair of socks. What he pays for a suit 
of clothes staggers the imagination. There are only 
two things that are cheap to buy in Russia just now: 
cats and dogs. You can buy a magnificent wolf- 
hound or other thoroughbred dog, or a pure bred 
Persian or Angora cat for a song in Petrograd, be- 
cause people can't afford to feed pet animals. Mr. 
Basil Miles, attached to the Root mission, took 
home with him two Russian wolfhounds that are 
going to make him the most envied man in the next 
dog show in his town, and the song he sang to get 
them was too short to mention. 

Russia is a very cold country and almost every 
one, rich and poor alike, wears furs. The rich wear 
sable, mink and ermine, and the poor wear rabbit 
and sheep skin. But furs just now are as difficult 
to buy as other clothing indispensables. There are 
several special reasons for this shortage of fur in a 
fur country. There are not so many people hunting 



1 66 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



furs since the war, and the pelts are scarcer; and 
besides, the Russians have never cured and dyed 
their own furs. They sent them to Germany to be 
prepared for market, and, of course, the war put 
a stop to that. Aside from these special reasons, the 
fur shortage and all the food, clothing and other 
shortages are caused by two main obstacles. There 
is plenty of food in the empire, plenty of raw ma- 
terials for clothing. But the transportation system 
has almost broken down and they cannot distribute 
food or raiment. Also the factory system has all 
but broken down, and they cannot produce the cloth- 
ing. There are besides minor and contributory ob- 
stacles, some of which I shall describe. The main 
reason why Russia will starve and freeze this win- 
ter is because the people of Russia have allowed 
their railroad system to go to pieces, and because 
they have, to an almost incredible extent, ceased to 
do any work. 

I cannot speak as an expert about the railroad 
situation, nor would mere figures and statistics give 
the reader any adequate picture of the railroad de- 
moralization. To say that on May 15, 19 17, the 
then Minister of Ways and Communications re- 
ported to the Duma that more than 25 per cent, of 
the total number of locomotives in the empire were 
laid up for repairs wouldn't begin to express the 
thing. The average reader does not know that 5 per 
cent, of "sick" locomotives is considered high by 
competent railroad managers. I might go further 
and say that the number of freight cars loaded from 
May 15 to May 31, 1917, was 87,000 poods less 
than the number loaded between those dates in 19 16, 



GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 167 



but that would not mean much. Few outside of Rus- 
sia know what a pood is. As a matter of fact it is 
thirty-six pounds. But figures cannot adequately de- 
scribe the situation. 

What told the tale of railroad demoralization to 
me was the constant anxiety I heard voiced on all 
sides by people trying to buy their winter stock of 
wood and coal. There is an endless quantity of 
wood in Russia. Great forests of pine and cedar 
and birch — beautiful forests. I had often marveled 
at them from the windows of my railway carriage 
passing through Finland and the country between 
Petrograd and Moscow. Plenty of this wood has 
been cut. I saw thousands and thousands of cords 
of it piled up along the railroad tracks, and of course 
there must have been much more elsewhere. Petro- 
grad is built on a marsh and the ground is drained 
by picturesque if rather badly smelling canals which 
run through the city and empty into the Neva. 
Down one of the widest of these — the Moika, 
which I crossed every day — a constant line of barges, 
loaded with wood, floated slowly, drawn by horses 
and sometimes by men walking along a towpath 
beside the canal. I used to watch those bargeloads 
of wood and wonder why, with such an almost un- 
paralleled means of distributing wood after it got 
there, the people of Petrograd should be troubled 
about the winter fuel supply. Not nearly enough of 
it was getting there last summer; that was all. The 
quantity that floated down the Moika and the other 
canals and got stacked up in woodyards and in the 
courtyards of apartment houses, hotels, hospitals, 
factories and even palaces, was not half the normal 



1 68 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



quantity. There weren't enough flat cars and loco- 
motives running to get the wood as far as the city 
limits. 

I tried the experiment of keeping house with the 
wife of the Outlook correspondent after he left Rus- 
sia on a mission. We had a charming little apart- 
ment offered us rent free, with a maid thrown in, 
if we would live in it and keep it from being looted. 
Every one who knew a Cossack or other reliable 
soldier, or an American, did that when they went to 
the country from Petrograd. We gave up house- 
keeping after a week and went back to hotels, partly 
because the maid could not get us enough to eat, 
and partly because we never had any hot water. 
The landlord of the apartment house had cut off 
the wood. He said that he couldn't get wood 
enough to warm the house next winter, much less 
provide warm baths for the tenants in summer. 

The railroad situation was visualized for me on a 
dreadful two days and nights' journey I took on a 
Russian railroad last July. Miss Beatty, of the San 
Francisco Bulletin, was with me, and the train was 
so small and so crowded that the only berth we could 
get was an upper one three feet wide. The two of 
us slept in that berth, Miss Beatty's head one way 
and mine the other. Every time the train struck a 
rough place on the rails the Bulletin came near los- 
ing its star reporter, for she had the outside, just 
above an open window. That railway carriage 
could have seated, by close crowding, eleven passen- 
gers. On the last night of the journey twenty-five 
people were packed into it. They took turns sitting 
down. 



GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 169 

Every railroad train you get on is about as 
crowded as that, and one of the most difficult things 
to buy at present is a railroad ticket. To buy one 
you usually have to bribe the ticket agent or the 
hotel manager. You go to the office of the Interna- 
tional Wagons-Lits and tell them that you want to 
go to Moscow or Kazan. You want to go to-mor- 
row or in three days, some near date. The clerk 
shakes his head. "I might be able to get you a ticket 
and a berth in three days," he will say. "Of course, 
you will have to pay a supplement; say, sixty rubles." 
Pressed for particulars he will explain that some 
one will have to be paid to stand in line for the 
ticket. I paid forty rubles extra to Bennet's, which 
is the Cook's of Petrograd, for a ticket to Moscow, 
and that was considered a bargain. When I wanted 
to return I asked the hotel management in Moscow 
how much they would charge to send to the station 
and get me a ticket, and they said one hundred 
rubles. The ruble was then about thirty cents, so 
I would have had to pay, in addition to the cost of 
the ticket, which had just been raised about 50 per 
cent, thirty dollars. I got the ticket in almost the 
only other way possible. I acted as a courier carry- 
ing confidential papers from a foreign consulate in 
Moscow to an embassy in Petrograd, and the consul 
used his official influence to get me a ticket for the 
regular price only. 

On the 2 1 st of July the Minister of Ways and 
Communications ordered a reduction of 50 per cent, 
in the number of travelers passing between Petrograd 
and Moscow, in view, he explained, of the shortage 



i7o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



of fuel and rolling stock. Soon it will be next to 
impossible to buy, for love or money, a ticket or a 
sleeping berth between the two points in Russia. 

This is nearly true now on the Trans-Siberian 
Railroad. Every Tuesday evening at 8 o'clock the 
weekly express on that famous line leaves the Nikolai 
station, Petrograd, and every berth is filled every 
week. What those passengers paid extra for their 
tickets forms one of the principal topics of conversa- 
tion during the long trip over Siberia. The passen- 
gers beguile the weary journey swapping experiences 
of how they came to be there at all. I have known 
people who waited weeks for a chance to pay the ex- 
tortionate supplement. The Trans-Siberian post 
train which leaves every night and makes stops along 
the way is a sight to behold before it leaves. The 
people crowd the train platform and fight for a place 
near the edge. As the train backs slowly into the 
station shed, the travelers run to meet it, climb in 
the windows, drag their women and children in, rush 
the platforms and fight like tigers to get in the doors. 
The number of carriages to each train has been re- 
duced gradually until now the train is too short to 
hold the travelers. 

But didn't we send a railroad commission to Rus- 
sia, and didn't the papers say something about some 
5,000 locomotives and 23,000 freight cars sent to 
Vladivostock? We did send a railroad commission, 
headed by John Stevens, of Panama canal fame, one 
of the greatest organizers and executives in the 
United States. This commission has done good 



GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR 171 



work. It has shown the Russians how they could 
immediately increase the efficiency of their railroads 
60 per cent. We have sent many locomotives and 
freight cars to Russia. Nevertheless the transpor- 
tation problem remains unsolved. 



CHAPTER XVIII 



WHEN THE WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS 

John Stevens, head of the railroad commission 
sent to Russia from the United States, has shown 
the Russian government how to increase its trans- 
portation facilities sixty per cent. In a report made 
public in mid-August Mr. Stevens said that the chief 
cause of the railroad crisis was bad management. 
Locomotives traveled 2,800 versts a month when 
they could be made to travel 5,000 versts. A verst 
is about three-quarters of a mile. Twice as much 
freight as was being hauled could be carried, said 
Mr. Stevens. Freight cars were constantly being 
sent out only half loaded. Mr. Stevens recom- 
mended government dictatorship of all railroads, 
both publicly and privately owned. That was rather 
naive, considering that the government was power- 
less to control, much less to dictate to, any depart- 
ment of activity in the empire. A little earlier Mr. 
Nekrassoff, then Minister of Ways and Communica- 
tions, issued a circular in which he outlined his plan 
for coping with the railroad crisis. He advised 
turning the entire railroad system over to the work- 
men, the engineers, firemen, conductors and machin- 
ists. A shriek of protest went up from the engineer- 
ing profession and a howl of laughter arose from 
the press of Russia. But the fact of the matter is 

172 



WHEN WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS 173 



that the railroads were and are still, for all practical 
purposes, in the hands of the working people, and so 
is every other industry in Russia. 

One of the great dreams of the socialists and 
philosophical anarchists is of the day when the 
worker shall own his tools, as they put it, when all 
industry shall be owned by the people who operate 
the machines, and all profits shall be shared by them. 
It really is a great dream, and will probably be real- 
ized in some measure some day. But not now. The 
human race is not yet educated to such a Utopia. 
The strongest proof that the capitalistic system is 
not yet ready to pass is the well-known fact that 
the secret ambition of almost every human being in 
every walk of life is to become a capitalist, large or 
small. This has just been proved on an enormous 
scale in Russia. The workers have seized the fac- 
tories, shops, department stores and offices, and in 
no instance of which I could learn, and I searched 
diligently, have they used their great opportunity 
wisely or unselfishly for the common good. They 
have used it to get all the money possible out of the 
employers and to render back the minimum of serv- 
ice. 

This is what is the matter with the transporta- 
tion system in Russia. It is the reason why the peo- 
ple of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities will go 
cold and hungry this winter, one reason why the 
death rate of children and old people, already ap- 
pallingly large, will grow more appalling within the 
next few months; one reason, and a very strong one, 
why order has not been restored in Russia. High 
as are the prices of all food and manufactured arti- 



174 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

cles, the working people, as a class, have money 
enough to pay for them, and not until the merchants' 
stocks are completely gone and the weather gets too 
cold to stand in line long hours in order to buy will 
the purblind workers realize their situation. Not 
until then will they realize what their selfishness and 
cruel folly have done to themselves and the entire 
working class of the country. 

So struck was I by the scarceness of goods in the 
shops and the soaring prices of almost every article 
that I went to the Minister of Labor and asked him 
to tell me something of industrial conditions of the 
country. I was not entirely ignorant of those con- 
ditions. I knew, for example, that Russia is not ex- 
clusively an agricultural country, that, on the con- 
trary, her development as a manufacturing country 
has been going on by leaps and bounds, especially in 
the last dozen years. Russia has a proletariat and 
a factory system, although not quite as large propor- 
tionately as those of the United States. Her iron 
industry, her cotton mills, her machine shops are 
enormous and in normal times they are wonderfully 
productive. After the suppressed revolution of 
1905-06 important reforms in the land laws were en- 
acted, and for the first time the peasants were given 
their lands in fee simple. That is, they were given 
an opportunity in certain circumstances to take title 
to their share in communal lands. This gave them 
an opportunity to sell if they chose, and a large num- 
ber of peasant artisans did sell their lands, moved 
into the cities and became factory workers. Before 
this time the factory workers had more or less alter- 
nated between town and rural life. 



WHEN WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS 175 

The leaders of the Social Democratic party en- 
couraged by every means in their power the selling 
of lands by peasant owners, because they wanted the 
workers to move to town, organize in labor unions 
and become a political power. In their own words, 
they wanted to create a landless working class, one 
which, having no stake in property, would the more 
easily revolt against the government and more heart- 
ily support the movement to create a cooperative 
commonwealth. It was good reasoning up to a cer- 
tain point. A man with a piece of land thinks twice 
before he puts that land in danger of being absorbed 
by his neighbors. He hesitates before he takes a 
course of action which might turn even a bad gov- 
ernment out at least. The bad government protects 
his title. But the leaders of the Social Democrats 
left an important human element out of their rea- 
soning. A landless man makes a good revolutionist, 
it is true, but he does not necessarily make a good co- 
operator. Nine and three-quarters times in ten he 
is just as strong for number one as the real estate 
owner. When he gets a chance to grab power and 
money he does it, and he divides up just as little as 
the others let him. 

A story is told in Russia which illustrates this 
trait of character. Some one asked a peasant of 
Little Russia what he would do if he were made 
czar. "I'd steal a hundred rubles and run away," 
was the prompt reply. In a word, that is virtually 
what the working people of Russia did as soon as 
the revolution of February, 19 17, made them into 
individual czars of Russia. 

When I called on the Minister of Labor and asked 



176 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



him what was the matter with industry, his face as- 
sumed an expression of mingled amusement and de- 
spair. "If you really want to know,'' he said, in 
effect, "go and look at some of our factories." 

I was given an official document, elaborately 
stamped and signed, authorizing me to enter and 
inspect any factory in Petrograd, and I began, bright 
and early the next morning, with one of the largest 
munitions factories in the Viborg district of the city. 
I showed my pass to the man at the gate, who read 
it doubtfully, and said he didn't think it was good. 
"What right has the Minister of Labor to give you 
permission to visit this plant?" he inquired. "If 
anybody had a right to give you such permission, I 
should think it would be the Minister of War, for 
only war materials are manufactured here. Any- 
how, I don't think you can get in." 

I asked him mildly if he was sure that he had the 
power to keep me out, and I suggested that he put 
the case up to a higher authority, the manager, for 
instance. He turned to a wall telephone in his little 
gate house and conversed with some one at the other 
end of the line. Then he said: "The committee is 
in session and will see you." 

A long walk through the enormous yard and past 
many shops brought me to the office building of the 
plant, and there, in a small room, I found the com- 
mittee, that is, the group of workmen elected by the 
entire working force of the factory to manage the 
industry and to fix all conditions of labor. Every 
industry in Russia is thus managed. I had a long 
talk with this committee, but I did not get into the 
factory. The man would not permit me to get in. 



WHEN WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS 177 



They wouldn't even allow me to see any one con- 
nected with the office force. Kindly but firmly they 
gave me to understand that they were all the power 
there was in that plant and they could give me all 
the information I could possibly need. So I sat 
there for an hour or so, and, through my interpreter, 
learned how manufacturing is carried on when the 
workers own their tools. 

Because I could carry but few notes out of the 
country, I am not certain how many delegates per 
thousand workers make up a committee of manage- 
ment in a Russian factory, but I think each unit of 
one hundred men elects a representative. Perhaps 
there are two hundred men to the unit. My memory 
for numbers is not always reliable. At all events, the 
committee members, who are usually the intelligent 
and highly paid workers, do no work except com- 
mittee work. But they draw their full pay. The 
employer has no voice in the conduct of his own busi- 
ness. The committee tells him how much he pays 
his employees, what their hours of work are, when 
they arrive and when they depart and how much they 
produce. And the employer pays the committee 
for its kind words and deeds. I asked the particular 
committee which thus informed me if this seemed 
fair to the employer. Mostly the men said they 
thought it did. One man asked me who in my opin- 
ion ought to pay the committee members. I told him 
I thought the workers might pay at least a part of 
their salaries, and perhaps also give the employers 
a casting vote in case of a tie, or something like that. 
They seemed to find the idea humorous, all except 
one fine, thoughtful young fellow, who said: "There 



178 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



may be an element of unfairness in some of the pres- 
ent conditions, but time will adjust them. There is 
no question but that the workers should own the in- 
dustries, and they will. The working class has never 
had a square deal and now that they have seized the 
powers of government, nothing less than confiscation 
of industries will satisfy them." 

The working class in Russia has had rather less 
of a square deal than any other in the modern world, 
it is true. The factory system being comparatively 
new in Russia, there has not been time for the work- 
ers to organize closely, and under the autocracy 
there was little or no chance to obtain enlightened 
factory legislation. There was hardly a chance for 
the Russian workman to attain a very high degree of 
skill in many industries. He could not, as a rule, 
learn the finest processes of his trade, because until 
the war broke out most of those processes were in 
the hands and under the control of Germany. When 
I was in Russia in 1906 one of the most striking 
things to me was the prevalence of German shop- 
keepers, German managers, German foremen. You 
hardly ever saw a Russian in command of any in- 
dustry. I spoke of this to a Russian friend and told 
him that I should not like to see in my country all 
the business controlled by foreigners, for these Ger- 
mans were not even Russian citizens. He shrugged 
his shoulders and said "Nitchevo," which means al- 
most anything and is a general expression of indif- 
ference or resignation to the inevitable. "We have 
no heads for that sort of thing, we Russians," he 
apologized. 

"But what if you should ever go to war with 



WHEN WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS 179 



Germany?" I asked. And he, sobered a little, said: 
"We should have to learn to be business men and 
skilled mechanics, in that case, and we should have 
a devil of a time doing it." 

Eight years later, almost to a day, they did go to 
war with Germany, and they did have a devil of a 
time adjusting their industries to meet the crisis 
caused by the exodus of thousands of highly skilled 
German managers and department heads in hun- 
dreds of factories and shops throughout the empire. 

One story told me in Moscow is representative, I 
believe. A very large factory taken over by the gov- 
ernment for the fine toolmaking facilities its ma- 
chines afforded was found to be managed exclusively 
by German foremen and managers. Not only had 
they drawn large salaries for years in that factory, 
but they had insisted on hiring for the last pro- 
cesses and the most highly skilled jobs workmen 
from Germany. They didn't want, or rather the 
German government didn't want, the Russian peo- 
ple to know how to do skilled work. They wanted 
to keep Russia in exactly the right condition for 
permanent commercial exploitation by the father- 
land. 

I go into this because I think it is only fair to the 
Russian working class to explain that they have 
not been allowed to develop the intelligence and skill 
which the English and American working classes 
have done. Because of this ignorance the Russians 
of the working class have in their few months' de- 
bauch of liberty and the control of industry wrecked 
their country industrially and have brought them- 
selves and their own people to the verge of starva- 



180 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



tion. They have done to their class approximately 
what the mutinous soldiers at the front did to the 
men who wanted to go forward and fight — shot 
them in the back. I know this, because I have seen 
it. The next factory I approached the committee 
let me in. 



CHAPTER XIX 



WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE 

When I got on the train to leave Russia for the 
United States the first familiar face I saw was that 
of Mr. Daniel Cheshire, mill owner and operator 
of Petrograd. "I'm going home to England to en- 
list," he said, as we shook hands. 

"What have you done with your mills?" I asked. 

"I have left them to the Tavarishi," replied Mr. 
Cheshire, "I thought I might as well." 

Daniel Cheshire is not the only large manufac- 
turer who has abandoned his business after a vain 
struggle to cope with the situation created by the 
Russian revolution, and the taking over by the work- 
ing people of the control of industry. Others have 
given up the struggle, and many more will probably 
follow their example. But Mr. Cheshire's story I 
know at first hand. His abandonment of his mills 
is full of significance, partly because of the impor- 
tance of his branch of manufacturing, and partly 
because his act may hasten the day when, through 
sheer lack of the necessities of life, the Russian peo- 
ple will cease pursuing their Utopian dream and will 
content themselves with a government which, al- 
though still capitalistic, will rescue them from star- 
vation and ruin. 

181 



1 82 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



Those who think of Russia as a land of snow and 
ice will be interested to learn that in Turkestan and 
Transcaucasia as well as in other provinces of the 
south and east, they raise millions of pounds of very 
good cotton, the seeds of which originally came from 
America. Those who think that every Russian peas- 
ant does nothing but farm will be surprised to hear 
that over a million Russians work in textile mills, 
principally cotton textiles. 

When cotton spinning and weaving began in Rus- 
sia the mill owners, in most cases, sent to England 
for their foremen and managers, and the descen- 
dants of some of these Englishmen still live and still 
manage cotton mills in Russia. The Cheshire fam- 
ily is a case in point. The original Cheshire went 
out from Manchester in the 1840's to manage a 
small cotton spinning factory in Petrograd. He 
saved money, bought a partnership and enlarged 
the business. His sons enlarged it still more, and 
to-day his grandchildren own and operate ten large 
cotton mills in and around Petrograd. Daniel 
Cheshire, a keen young man of thirty-something, is 
head of the family and chief owner of the mills. 
That is, he was up to February, 19 17. After that 
he wasn't. The Tavarishi, or "comrades, " whose 
wages he paid, became the virtual owners then, and 
on August 30, 19 1 7, they became, temporarily at 
least, the sole owners. 

It was in one of the Cheshire cotton mills that I 
got the most intimate view of what becomes of in- 
dustry when the workers own their tools. Perhaps 
it would be fairer to say, when the workers seize 
their tools. Some day, perhaps, they will find out 



WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE 183 



how to own them honestly and then they will use 
them wisely and for the common good. 

It was a happy accident that first led me into a 
Cheshire cotton mill. After being refused permis- 
sion to inspect the big munition works to which I 
applied — refused by the workers' committee, not by 
the proprietors — I wandered through the Viborg 
district of Petrograd until I found another large fac- 
tory. This time the permit given me by the Min- 
ister of Labor worked better, and I was shown into 
the general office of the plant. It was a big, mod- 
ern, up-to-date office, furnished with the usual desks, 
files, safes and the like, but to remind me that I was 
in revolutionary Russia, the walls were decorated 
with many red flags, and banners inscribed with 
white-lettered mottoes and declarations. The head 
of the workmen's committee, who came forward 
to meet me, looked a little doubtful about letting me 
go through the mill, but just then the door opened 
and a strapping young Englishman came in. "See the 
works?" said he. "Of course you may. I'd like 
nothing better than to show my mills just now to 
newspaper people. I call them my mills yet, but 
only for a joke." 

He said something in Russian to the workman, 
who shrugged his shoulders and stood aside, and 
Mr. Cheshire and I went into the nearest mill room. 
It was a storeroom, as a matter of fact, the receiv- 
ing room for the huge bales of coarse yarn spun in 
another mill. The bales were soft and made excel- 
lent beds, a fact that was not overlooked, for two 
tired Russian mill-workers reposed blissfully on a 
pile of bales as we passed through, sleeping the sleep 



1 84 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

of the just. They were not the only sleepers I saw 
in that mill. Several women were taking naps on 
piles of cloth near their machines, and a great many 
of the workers, men and women, might as well have 
been asleep, for they were doing no work. One 
woman was displaying a new pair of shoes to a 
group of other women, who stopped their machines 
to look. Shoes are so expensive in Russia at present 
that a new pair is worth looking at, I admit, but 
they might have postponed the exhibition until clos- 
ing time. These women stood and discussed the 
shoes, from every point of view, apparently, nor 
did they go back to their machines when we stopped 
and discussed the women. 

"Do you mean to tell me that you cannot order 
them back to their work?" I asked. 

"Oh, I can order them," was the reply. "But if 
they choose not to go that would make me look 
rather foolish, wouldn't it?" 

"You could discharge them, couldn't you?" I 
countered. 

"I certainly could not," declared Mr. Cheshire. 
"Nobody can discharge an employe until the shop 
committee has sat on the case and decided that it 
does not want the man or woman in the mill. All 
I can do is to make my complaints to the commit- 
tee and ask it to act." 

Mr. Cheshire was born in Russia, and has lived 
there all his life except for a few years spent in an 
English school. Yet he speaks the English of his 
grandfather, the same unmistakable little Lanca- 
shire burr. He has the Lancastrian's sense of 
humor also and he laughed even when he told me 



WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE 185 

of the demoralization and ruin in which the fantasies 
of the revolution had plunged his business. The 
utter absurdity of it was as present in his mind as 
the disaster. 

"Look at that man," he said, pointing to a ma- 
chine at which a man sat and wound cotton cloth 
into huge round cylinders. "He and the others at his 
particular job have had their wages raised to six- 
teen rubles (about $5.25) a day. Yes, of course. 
The committee decides on the wage scale. I am not 
consulted. Even if I were, I should have nothing 
except a complimentary vote, one against hundreds. 
That chap gets sixteen rubles a day, and in addition 
I must hire a girl at four rubles a day to lift the 
roll of cloth off the machine." 

We passed into a print room still discussing the 
committee. I asked Mr. Cheshire if it was true that 
these workmen's committees were highly paid men 
who performed no service to their employers and 
still received their regular pay. 

"It is true," he replied. Then he went on to 
tell me the following story: "The work we do in 
this room is something a little unusual in Russia. 
Few mills have these machines as yet, and our prod- 
uct is almost the only cotton goods of the kind pos- 
sible to buy in Russian markets since the war. Be- 
fore that a great deal of it was imported from Eng- 
land and Germany. Naturally it is scarce at present, 
and not long ago one of our men complained that 
he couldn't buy it at all. 'Of course you cannot/ I 
told him, 'because these mills are turning out very 
little of it. Go into the print room and see for 
yourself how many machines are idle for lack of 



1 86 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

workers.' And then I made him this offer, for he 
was a member of the committee : 'Let me have four 
men of your committee back to work on these ma- 
chines, and I will guarantee that you will soon be 
able to buy the goods you want.' Well, he agreed, 
and he got the rest of the committee to agree, and I 
got the men back. But what do you think those four 
men demanded? They said that they had been 
doing hard mental work on the committee for two 
months, and they thought before they went back to 
the machines they ought to have a month's vacation 
with pay. I did draw the line there. I told them 
I'd close the works first. But since then I under- 
stand that the committee has begun to discuss the 
two months on and one month off as a future policy. 
They say that mental work — they call committee 
meetings mental work — is much harder than physi- 
cal labor." 

"I'm glad they are finding it out," I remarked. 
"Perhaps after a while they will discover that even 
you belong to the proletariat." 

"If they raise the wages again," said Mr. Chesh- 
ire, "I mean to ask them to give me a job. I'll have 
to. Then they'll have some real mental work find- 
ing out how to pay me or themselves either. This 
factory and all the others in our name have been 
running farther and farther behind for months. 
Soon we shall have to close. We should have been 
closed before now except that we hoped that a strong 
government would be formed and industry as well as 
the army and navy would be placed under a dicta- 
torship." 

The committees have created an eight-hour day 



WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE 187 



in this particular industry. Some industries have a 
six-hour day, and I was told that numbers of work- 
ing people claimed that a two-hour day was the ideal 
towards which they aspired. I heard also, on good 
authority, that certain groups favored a complete 
cessation of all factory work during the three hot 
months of summer. 

Mr. Cheshire's mills were supposed to run eight 
hours a day, but he declared that he would be satis- 
fied, in present circumstances, to get a good, solid 
five hours' work out of his people. If they would 
stay on the job and actually produce for five hours 
every working day he thought he might avert bank- 
ruptcy. "We close at five," he told me. "But along 
about 4 o'clock you watch them begin to go home." 

I watched and they did. Man after man and 
woman after woman stopped all work and began to 
put on their shoes. Many millworkers work bare- 
footed. They gathered in little knots at a window 
and looked out, talking aimlessly. They strolled 
about the rooms. Some just stopped work and went 
out. At half past four in the rooms through which 
I walked, not half the machines were running. 

"Is it really like this in all the mills and factories 
of Russia?" I asked, "or is this mill an exception to 
the rule? Is it worse than the average?" 

"It is no worse than most," was the reply. "It is 
better than some. Industrial Russia has completely 
broken down in some places. It is rapidly breaking 
down everywhere." 

What I saw afterwards absolutely confirmed this 
statement. The industrial world is as much in the 
hands of the Bolsheviki or extremists as are the coun- 



1 88 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



cils of workmen's and soldiers' delegates. While the 
provisional government of the early weeks of the 
revolution discussed ways and means whereby the 
workers in mills and factories might gradually ac- 
quire an interest in their industries and a voice in the 
councils of the managers, the workers settled the 
whole thing by turning the employers out and tak- 
ing over the industries themselves. They have voted 
themselves enormous salaries, short hours and little 
work. But they have done little or nothing to in- 
sure the permanence of the salaries. Soon there 
will be, instead of an eight hour day, no working 
day at all. All the shops and factories will close. 
In Moscow is the largest and finest department 
4 store in Russia. It is an English concern, Muir & 
f Merrilies, managed and largely owned by Mr. Wil- 
liam L. Cazalet. I know him well, and his testi- 
mony, when I saw him in August, bore out this 
statement. The committee in Muir & Merrilies voted 
that they found it inconvenient to have clerks and 
other employes go home for lunch at different hours. 
They therefore ordered the store closed every day 
from 12 to 2 o'clock. The store was accordingly closed. 

"I don't mind," said Mr. Cazalet cheerfully. 
"My stocks are running low, the transportation sys- 
tem is on the verge of collapse, and I can't get any 
more goods. As each line of goods is exhausted I 
shall close the department. When the time comes 
I shall close the store and go home to England for 
a vacation." 

He will go, as Daniel Cheshire went, others will 
follow, and the workers will own their tools. They 
won't own anything else. 



CHAPTER XX 



MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA 

Emmeline Pankhurst, the English militant 
suffrage leader, known to thousands in this coun- 
try, went to Russia in late June of this year to or- 
ganize the women of the country and help them to 
support the provisional government and to oppose 
the Bolsheviki or extremists. She succeeded in or- 
ganizing a group of strong and influential women 
leaders, and she might have accomplished great 
good had not Kerensky frowned on the movement. 
Mrs. Pankhurst's project, in my opinion, was one 
of Kerensky's many lost opportunities. 

This will answer a natural curiosity on the part of 
the reader as to why Mrs. Pankhurst came to be in 
revolutionary Russia. She went of her own initia- 
tive and under the auspices of her suffrage organiza- 
tion, the Women's Social and Political Union, but 
her plan had the warm approval of the English 
premier, Mr. Lloyd George, who personally issued 
her passport and that of her secretary, Jessie Ken- 
ney. Mr. Lloyd George also gave directions that 
Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Kenney should be allowed 
to travel on the only passenger boat that plies regu- 
larly between Great Britain and Norway. This boat 
is strongly convoyed and it is used by very few peo- 

189 



i9o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



pie not in the service of the English government. No 
one in England has a higher esteem for Mrs. Pank- 
hurst than Lloyd George, and since the beginning of 
the war the two erstwhile enemies have become 
friends and allies. Mrs. Pankhurst's suffragettes 
fired a house that Mr. Lloyd George was building 
in the country, and Mrs. Pankhurst was sentenced 
to three years' penal servitude for the deed. She 
had served several weeks of the sentence, in hunger 
strike intervals which extended over a year or more, 
when the war broke out and all internal feuds were 
declared off in England. The Pankhursts at once 
called a truce of militancy and ever since have done 
yeoman service in recruiting for the army, collect- 
ing money for war sufferers, especially in Serbia, 
and in many other lines of patriotic work. 

The whole world admired the statesmanship of 
this policy, but only a few people know how really 
statesmanlike it was. Among those who do know is 
the English premier, for without it he might not 
have become premier. In abandoning militancy 
Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel were 
actuated by two motives : they wanted England and 
the allies to win the war, and they saw in the war 
an opportunity to further the cause of woman suf- 
rage. They were under no delusion that a grateful 
country would bestow the vote on its women as a 
reward for their unselfish war services. Women 
have rendered the noblest kind of service in all the 
wars that have ever been fought, but no country ever 
showed its gratitude by making them citizens for it. 
Witness our civil war. Mrs. Pankhurst and Chris- 
tabel knew that suffrage would come in England 



MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA 191 

when the political situation suffered certain changes, 
and it would come in no other way. 

They were in France in July, 19 14, Mrs. Pank- 
hurst out of prison under the famous "Cat and 
Mouse" act, and resting up for another bout with 
the Holloway jailers. Christabel lived in Paris and 
edited there the British suffragette weekly newspaper. 
They watched with deep emotion the mobilization 
of the French army and saw the French women 
drop all their other activities and mobilize for hos- 
pital and relief work. They agreed that they must 
go back to England and organize their women for 
the same work, and they said: "At last! A chance 
to get rid of Asquith and Sir Edward Grey!" 

These two men, especially Mr. Asquith, were the 
arch enemies of the women's cause. Mr. Asquith 
had consistently blocked the woman suffrage bills in 
Parliament, even when a large majority of the 
House of Commons wanted to vote favorably on 
them. Mr. Lloyd George, on the other hand, was, 
theoretically at least, a suffragist. He wanted the 
women to have votes, but he wanted something else 
a great deal more. He wanted, with an earnestness 
amounting to a cosmic urge, to be prime minister 
of England. His whole soul being set on that am- 
bition, he was not going to take people's minds off 
of his candidacy by getting into the woman suffrage 
controversy. So he put the whole subject one side 
for future reference. 

Mrs. Pankhurst, great and wise stateswoman that 
she is, perfectly understood this. She knew that, if 
Mr. Lloyd Gorge became premier, he would prob- 
ably put a suffrage bill through Parliament, and she 



192 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



and Christabel knew that the new war cabinet, 
which they trusted would corne, would probably have 
Lloyd George at its head. So they bent all their 
energies to ousting Mr. Asquith and boosting Mr. 
Lloyd George. They criticized caustically, with 
pen and voice, the cabinet's war policies, they turned 
a whole volume of scorn on England's Serbian blun- 
ders and the Dardanelles failure. They went all 
over England talking about Mr. Asquith and his 
ministers, and their work told. So when Mrs. Pank- 
hurst decided to go to Russia and do what she could 
to rally the women of that distracted country, Mr. 
Lloyd George knew that she would do it if any one 
could. He gave her a passport and a safe conduct, 
and she went. A little later Ramsay Macdonald, 
leader of England's "little group of wilful men" op- 
posing the war, thought he would go to Russia and 
undo any good Mrs. Pankhurst might do. 

Mr. Lloyd George at first refused to give Mr. 
Macdonald a passport, but his refusal so angered 
the Bolshevik element in the Petrograd Council of 
Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates that Kerensky 
was actually forced to ask the English premier to 
allow Mr. Macdonald to visit Russia. The English 
premier therefore consented to issue the passport, 
but the Seamen's Union, which was not in the least 
afraid of the Petrograd soldiers and workmen, or 
of any international misunderstandings, refused 
point blank to allow Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to 
travel on any boat crossing to Norway. The union 
served notice that the moment Mr. Macdonald 
stepped foot on any boat leaving England the sailors 



MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA 193 

on that boat would step off. Mr. Ramsay Macdon- 
ald accordingly never stepped on a boat. 

Mrs. Pankhurst was very well received in Russia. 
The newspapers published columns about her, 
statesmen and ambassadors called on her, almost as 
on a visiting royalty, and the finest women in Petro- 
grad came to her and welcomed her proffered aid. 
Which is certainly discouraging to those suffragists 
who always try to be good and well mannered and 
never picket the White House or disturb a congress- 
man's afternoon nap. A series of meetings were ar- 
ranged for Mrs. Pankhurst, but they were neither 
well arranged nor well managed. Some of them 
got into the hands of women who had movements of 
their own to push, and who were willing to use Mrs* 
Pankhurst's drawing capacity to fill a room, but 
were not willing to turn the meeting over to her 
when she got there. 

I was present at such a meeting, which had for 
chairman a lady of title who had a scheme of some 
kind, and the speakers were mostly women who had 
other schemes, and they all talked and talked about 
their schemes, until I feared that Mrs. Pankhurst 
would never be given a chance to talk at all. One 
woman spoke for over an hour about the food situ- 
ation. Her remedy was to send a commission to 
America and beg that a shipload of food be sent via 
Archangel to Petrograd. It was pointed out to her 
at some length by Mr. MacAllister Smith, an 
American business man living in Petrograd, that 
there was plenty of food nearer home than America, 
and that it didn't need to be begged for. 

Through it all Mrs. Pankhurst sat quietly, but I 



194 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

who knew her well saw a suspicious little color creep 
into her cheeks and a light of battle flash into her 
gray eyes. I don't know what might have happened, 
but what did happen was dramatic. A tall, fine- 
looking woman in the back of the room sprang to 
her feet and burst into a passionate speech of pro- 
test. While the women in that room were wasting 
time in inconsequential talk the Germans were stead- 
ily advancing, the Russian troops were retreating 
and ruin and desolation were at their very doors. 
She begged them for the sake of bleeding Russia to 
drop all controversy and let Mrs. Pankhurst, if she 
could, tell them what to do. 

As she sat down, or rather dropped exhausted 
into her seat, Mrs. Pankhurst stood up. She is a 
small woman, but when she is in certain moods she 
manages somehow to look tall. She looked tall on 
this occasion. She spoke in French and her talk 
lasted not longer than fifteen minutes, but when she 
finished half the women in the room would have 
gone into the trenches after her. The others looked 
frightened. Mrs. Pankhurst told the women that 
250 Russian women had gone out of their homes, 
donned soldiers' uniforms and were prepared to 
give their lives for their country and the democracy 
of the world. Mrs. Pankhurst was naturally an ad- 
mirer of Botchkareva and her Battalion of Death, 
and had a few days before this meeting reviewed the 
regiment. She told these women of leisure that if 
working women were willing to risk their lives on 
the battlefield for the freedom of Russia the women 
who remained at home ought to be willing to risk 
their lives on the streets. Whenever a Bolshevik 



MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA 195 



street orator preached separate peace or a cessation 
of fighting, a woman of education and ability ought 
to stand up and tell that same street crowd the truth. 
The women ought to storm the Soviets all over Rus- 
sia and force the men to support Kerensky and the 
Provisional Government in their effort to rally the 
army and defeat the Germans. 

The movement, she told them, must be a Russian 
women's movement only. No foreigners should ap- 
pear in it at all. They must do the work, but she 
was there to give them the full benefit of her expe- 
rience as an organizer. She would show them how 
to do the work, how to train speakers, how to man- 
age politicians, how to arrange demonstrations. 
One of the first things she advised them to do was to 
establish a headquarters in a conspicuous place, and 
to get up a great demonstration of women to march 
in a body to the Winter Palace or the Tauride Pal- 
ace, wherever the Provisional Government was hold- 
ing its meetings at the time. They should offer their 
services to the government, and let the country see 
that women were in the field to support the war. 
That speech and that program swept the women off 
their feet. Immediate steps were taken to organize, 
and a few women, without waiting for organization, 
actually did go out into the streets and talk against 
the Bolsheviki. 

Then came the days of the July revolution when 
all street speaking ceased, and that interfered with 
the women's plan. What discouraged it most of all 
was Kerensky's cynical attitude toward it. A woman 
of rank and of great ability, knowing Kerensky well, 
went to him and told him what they proposed to 



ig6 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

do, and asked for his cooperation. To her aston- 
ishment he refused point blank and he told her that 
the women would not be allowed to make a demon- 
stration or to march to the palace. Naturally she 
asked him why, and he replied evasively that there 
had been too many demonstrations already. 

Ambassador Francis shared the women's disap- 
pointment to the extent of calling on Kerensky and 
trying to make him see the value of their assistance 
in an hour of crisis, but Kerensky persisted in his 
refusal. 

I do not understand why he acted in this manner. 
His own domestic affairs were in a sad state at this 
time, a rumor stating that Mme. Kerenskaia was 
divorcing her famous husband. It may be that 
Kerensky was in a state of mind of general preju- 
dice against all women. Perhaps he has the Napo- 
leonic conception of the position of women in the 
state. I do not know. But if he is an anti-suffragist 
he is almost alone in his opinion in Russia. Mrs. 
Pankhurst did not have to convert the country to 
suffrage. There is no spoken opposition to it any- 
where, as far as I could discover. It is taken for 
granted that women will vote under the new consti- 
tution. They have voted already in municipal elec- 
tions, and in many cities they have been elected to 
the town dumas. Fourteen women were elected to 
the Moscow town duma last summer. 

Neither is Russia opposed to militant suffragism. 
Mrs. Pankhurst was a guest of honor one night at 
the great congress of Cossacks in Petrograd. When 
she appeared on the platform she received an ova- 
tion, and Prof. Miliukoff's introduction of the fa- 



MRS. PANKHURST IN RUSSIA 



197 



mous Englishwoman was a high eulogy. Mrs. Pank- 
hurst's autobiography has been translated into Rus- 
sian and is widely circulated. Her mission failed 
because Kerensky killed it. That is all. Her visit 
to Russia was not a complete failure, however, for 
she succeeded in awakening at least one group of 
Russian women to a keen sense of their political re- 
sponsibilities. They have begun to work, and when 
order is restored in the country, their work will be 
heard of. 

They told her in my hearing that they had never 
before realized what was before them, and they did 
not intend that the new constitution should be writ- 
ten by any but the best men in Russia. Much can 
be expected of Russian women in the future, in my 
opinion. 

Among the working people the women have 
shown themselves to be at least as ready for citizen- 
ship as the men. They appear among the Bolshe- 
viki, of course, and they are seen among the slack- 
ers in industry. But one group of women workers 
played a loyal part throughout the February revolu- 
tion and in the after troubles. This was the tele- 
phone force, especially the girls in the big central 
office in the Morskaia. These girls, without any di- 
rection or orders, joined in an absolute refusal to 
connect the headquarters of the Bolsheviki in the 
dancer's palace on the Neva, or the munitions fac- 
tory which was their other stronghold. Cut off from 
using the telephone the mutinous soldiers and work- 
men were severely handicapped, and the govern- 
ment was materially assisted. 

Women of the educated classes will play an im- 



198 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

portant part in the reconstruction of Russia. They 
will hold office, and may sit in the ministry. Already 
one woman has been appointed adjunct Minister of 
Public Welfare. This was the well known and effi- 
cient Countess Panine, whose civic work is famous 
throughout the empire. Countess Panine held office 
for a short time only, because no ministry held 
together long. That she will be returned to office 
when stability is secured, there seems to be no doubt. 



CHAPTER XXI 



KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN 

It is unfortunate that nothing has ever been writ- 
ten about Kerensky except eulogies. However de- 
served they may be, eulogies have the fault of not 
being informative. Who is Kerensky? What kind 
of a man is he? Why hasn't he restored order in 
Russia? If he cannot restore order, discipline the 
army and make it fight, why doesn't he step aside 
and let somebody else try? These questions have 
been asked on all sides. 

I may not be able to answer all or any conclu- 
sively. But I was in Russia three months, and I 
watched Kerensky progress from Minister of War 
to Minister-President of the Provisional Govern- 
ment and virtual President of the Russian Republic. 
I can tell my own observations of the man, and I 
can present the evidence of events, allowing the 
reader to draw his conclusions. I saw Kerensky 
frequently, heard him speak several times, and, like 
almost every one else, I went through a period of 
extreme enthusiasm for him. A certain enthusiasm 
I have retained. I still think he has achieved mar- 
vels in keeping a government together and remain- 
ing for nearly six months at the head of that gov- 
ernment. In fact Kerensky, whatever else is said 
of him, for a time at least kept before the wild-eyed, 

199 



2oo INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



liberty-mad masses of the Russian people the certain 
fact that governments must be, that the state cannot 
exist without leaders. 

There was apparently no other man in Russia 
who could do this thing. The old theory that great 
events always produce great men seems to have 
failed in this case. The most stupendous event in 
modern history, the Russian revolution, has as yet 
produced no great, or even, when Kerensky is left 
out, no near-great men. The first provisional gov- 
ernment contained able men like Lvoff and Miliu- 
koff. But they could no more cope with the situa- 
tion created by the fall of autocracy in Russia than 
so many children could operate a railroad system. 

These men thought that they had helped to bring 
on a political revolution. They little knew their 
Russia. There was just one man of ability in that 
first ministry who knew the truth, and he knew only 
part of it. Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, the so- 
cialist who was appointed Minister of Justice, knew 
that what the world was about to witness in Russia 
was a social revolution. But he, too, was blind to 
the task before him. At the very outset of his career 
as Minister of Justice, Kerensky insisted on abolish- 
ing the death penalty. 'T do not wish that this shall 
be a bloody revolution," he declared. In one sen- 
tence he showed how little he, too, knew his Russia. 

There was some excuse for ignorance on the part 
of most of the other ministers. Prince Lvoff, for 
example, was a large estate owner, a man who lived 
in the country a great deal of the time, one who had 
been active in the affairs of his zemstvo or county 
council, a friend and adviser of peasants, but always 



KEREN SKY, THE MYSTERY MAN 201 



the great gentleman, the aristocrat. Miliukoff was 
a university professor, a man of books, an amateur 
of music. And so on through the list. 

But Kerensky was no aristocrat. He was an ob- 
scure lawyer, one who specialized in cases of men 
and women accused of political offenses. He de- 
fended with fiery zeal young students whose revolu- 
tionary activities drew them within the tiger claws 
of the autocracy. He was the friend of the poor. 
He was one of the executive council of the Social 
Revolutionary party, largely made up of peasants. 
Why did he not know and understand his country- 
men ? Why could he not have known that the abol- 
ishment of the death penalty at that hour of supreme 
crisis would drench the revolution in blood? 

Kerensky was in the beginning an extreme ideal- 
ist, a preacher, a prophet. He changed a great deal 
between February and November, 191 7. But 
events, I think, on the whole, prove him an extreme 
idealist, a dreamer instead of a doer. Such men and 
women are never really great as leaders. They can 
stir up an enormous enthusiasm, send the crowd to 
the highest pitch of inspiration, even make it do 
monumental things for a time. But the dreamer's 
usefulness stops there. 

Somewhere in Russia, in one of the universities 
perhaps, in some farmhouse or on some lonely 
steppe, there lives a big, hard-fisted strong-brained 
ruthless boy who can and will some day do the kind 
of ruling and guiding Kerensky talks about and 
would have enforced if he could. Perhaps that boy 
got his inspiration from hearing Kerensky talk. But 
the boy is a real leader. He will stretch out his 



202 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



hand to the mob and the mob will obey his indomit- 
able will. 

Did the mob ever obey Kerensky's will? Take 
the army situation, for example. The day I ar- 
rived in Petrograd, May 28, I had a talk with the 
then American consul, Mr. North Winship. He 
told me what he had seen of the revolution, and 
spoke gravely and apprehensively of the future. 
The sedition in many regiments at the front was, to 
his mind, the most sinister single menace that had yet 
developed. "Kerensky, the new war minister, has 
just been sent down to the front," he told me. u He 
will save the situation if any living human being can. 
His influence over the Russians is enormous. He 
can sway them like the tides with his eloquence." 

Kerensky, who all the world knows is a sickly man, 
spared himself no whit during those critical days. 
He tore all over the front in motor cars. He made 
scores of speeches, thrilling speeches. Every one 
reading in the newspapers of his wonderful speeches 
breathed more freely and whispered, "We are 
saved." But were they? 

One incident. It may have been cabled to the 
American newspapers. On one front where Keren- 
sky was speaking a soldier, doubtless deputed by 
the less brave in the regiment, stepped forward and 
said: "It is all very well to urge us to fight for 
liberty, but if a man is killed fighting what good is 
liberty to him?" Instantly Kerensky's wrath poured 
out in a torrent of eloquence. He denounced the 
man for a traitor and a disgrace. The man who 
would think about his miserable skin when the free- 
dom of his mother country was threatened was unfit 



KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN 203 



to live with brave men. Turning to the colonel of 
the regiment, he demanded that the soldier be de- 
graded and immediately turned out of the army, 
sent home a branded coward. 

The colonel replied that there were others in the 
regiment who might, with justice, receive the same 
treatment. But no, said Kerensky, one man dis- 
graced was enough. He would be a symbol of dis- 
honor. The Russian army needed nothing more. 
The unfortunate man is said to have fallen in a 
swoon. I wouldn't be surprised if this was so. But 
he was probably glad enough after he recovered 
that he was sent home. Nor was the symbol of dis- 
honor enough for the Russian army. It continued 
to desert. 

Often after one of Kerensky's speeches he would 
call on the troops to declare whether or not they 
would fight. Always they roared out that they 
would, to the death. Sometimes they did, it is true, 
but sometimes also they didn't. At present no one 
can tell whether any soldiers, except the Cossacks and 
the women, are going to go forward when com- 
manded. 

When the army demoralization, fraternization 
and desertions began to assume recent frightful 
proportions Kerensky issued a manifesto telling the 
soldiers what he was prepared to do to deserters. 
They would not be shot — no, the death penalty was 
for all time abolished in Russia. But deserters would 
be treated as traitors. Their families would receive 
no soldiers' benefits, and they would not be allowed 
to participate in the redistribution of land. The 
Minister-President, for by this time Kerensky was at 



20 4 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



the head of the Provisional Government, would give 
the deserters time to get back to their regiments. 
He named a date about three weeks in advance. 
But on that day, at the extreme limit, all soldiers 
must be back in their regiments. This manifesto 
was issued not once, but three times, as I have stated. 
Three separate dates were given, three ultimata 
pronounced. But none of them was even noticed by 
the demoralized soldiers. On one date, June 18, 
it is true, Kerensky's order to advance was obeyed. 
At all events, the troops advanced on that day and 
fought a victorious fight. It may have been in re- 
sponse to Kerensky's order, or it may have been a 
coincidence. 

Kerensky's idealism began to suffer. He began 
to see his people as an unruly, unreasoning, sanguin- 
ary mob. But he loved the mob and could not bring 
himself to do it violence even for its own good. In 
July he agreed that Korniloff should be made com- 
mander-in-chief of the army, with power to shoot de- 
serters in the face of battle. Korniloff's demand for 
full command of the army, both at the front and in 
the reserve, with power to shoot all slackers, Keren- 
sky would not agree to. However, in that same 
month of July, 19 17, Kerensky had progressed so 
far that he told the world that he was prepared to 
save Russia and Russian unity by blood and iron, if 
argument and reason, honor and conscience, were 
not sufficient. Apparently they were not sufficient, 
but where was the blood and iron? Beating Russia 
into submission would be a big job for anybody just 
then, and it would be interesting to know just how 
Kerensky thought he could do it. He was the only 



KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN 205 



man of first rate ability in his ministry, the only 
strong force. He would have had to have some 
backing, and where could he get it? 

The Soviets? They have over and over, after 
fierce fighting, voted to give Kerensky support. 
Once they voted to give him supreme power. But 
they were never in earnest about it, and Kerensky 
knew it very well. They proved that they were in- 
sincere, it seems to me, by their action in October in 
refusing to support any ministry not made up exclu- 
sively of Socialists, and then making such a body 
subject to criticism and control. 

"The Germans are at our very gates," Kerensky 
told those men. "While you sit talking here, and are 
refusing to listen to words of reason from your com- 
mander-in-chief, your revolution is in danger of de- 
struction. Are there no words of mine to make you 
see it?" 

Words, words, words ! Hurled passionately from 
a burning heart into a whirling void. That seems to 
me to typify Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky talk- 
ing to the Russian revolutionary mob. 

The French revolution offers no parallel to this. 
Each one of the successive leaders of that mob ac- 
complished something good or bad. Mirabeau led 
the mass as far as a constituent assembly. Marat 
and Danton got rid of the king. Robespierre im- 
posed his will on Paris until the end of the reign of 
terror. Robespierre, "the sea-green incorruptible," 
is the nearest parallel to Kerensky that the French 
revolution offers. He led the mob in the direction it 
wanted to go. Kerensky followed it in a direction 
it wanted to go, begging it with all his eloquence 



206 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



to turn around and follow him. The mob applauded 
him, adulated him, wove laurels for his brow, but 
it would not follow him. 

He could not turn the mob. Perhaps nobody 
could have done so. Perhaps what had happened 
in Russia was inevitable, the only possible reaction 
from three centuries of Romanoff rule. To have it 
otherwise Kerensky has all but laid down his life. 
He suffers from some kind of kidney disease, and 
shortly before the February revolution he underwent 
an operation which nearly finished him. His right 
hand is incapacitated and is usually worn in a sling 
or tucked inside his coat. He is thin, hollow of 
chest and walks with a slight stoop. 

A man of thirty-seven, Kerensky is about five feet 
eight in height. He has thick brown hair, which 
bristles in pompadour all over his finely shaped head. 
His myopic eyes are blue, or grey, according to his 
mood. You see those eyes in Russia, deep, beauti- 
ful blue at times, steel grey at others. Kerensky' s 
eyes look straight at you and give you confidence in 
his candor. Sometimes when he is suffering physi- 
cally the eyes seem to sink in his head and lose all 
their brightness. When he is tired or discouraged 
they burn like somber fires. His face is pale, and 
even sometimes an ashen grey, and the face is deeply 
lined and scarred with troubled thought. The nose 
is big and strong, the mouth deeply curved, and the 
strong chin is cleft, with a deep line, rather than a 
dimple. 

Kerensky's speeches, to my mind, read better than 
they sound. He is intensely nervous on the plat- 
form, jerking, moving from side to side, striding 



KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN 207 



up and down, thrusting out his chin — a kind of de- 
livery I especially dislike. His gestures are all 
jerky and nervous. His voice is rather shrill. But 
in spite of all this he is a really eloquent speaker, 
and he rouses his audiences to a point of enthusiasm 
I have seen only one man equal. Of course I mean 
Theodore Roosevelt. 

Kerensky was formerly a model family man, I 
heard, but something went wrong, and last summer 
Mme. Kerenskaia and her two small sons, nine and 
seven, lived alone in the modest home. Kerensky 
lived in a suite in the Winter Palace and drove in 
the Czar's motor cars and was waited on by a whole 
retinue of faithful retainers. No disparagement to 
him is intended in the statement. The Winter Pal- 
ace was his headquarters, and as for the motor cars 
he had a right to drive in them, and every right in 
the world to be waited on and cared for. 

The parents of this fated child of revolution 
were well educated and fairly well circumstanced. 
The elder Kerensky was a school inspector and was 
able to give his son a university education. Rumor 
persistently states that Kerensky's mother was a 
Jewess, but I do not know whether this is true or 
not. 



CHAPTER XXII 



THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS 

One of the main contentions of the extremists of 
the Russian revolution concerns the self-governing 
rights of the states, large and small, which make up 
the empire. I met no one in Russia who did not 
agree that each one of the states had a right to local 
autonomy, but I met many who feared greatly lest 
the empire should be dismembered and should fall 
apart into a number of small, weak states. Espe- 
cially disastrous would this be, both to Russia and 
to the Allies, if it happened during the war. That 
Germany is doing everything in her power to bring 
about this end is proof enough that it would be dis- 
astrous to the Allies. Germany's army and navy and 
German diplomacy are working overtime to sepa- 
rate the Russian states. The enemy forces are 
working now to isolate the Baltic states and Fin- 
land, and German agents are busy all over the em- 
pire spreading the propaganda of secession. 

"The right of small peoples to govern them- 
selves" is one of the easiest gospels in the world to 
preach. As a principle it is not even debatable. In 
practice, however, it very often is far from expedient 
or practicable. But the recently liberated Russians, 
each separate language and racial group smarting 
from remembered wrongs inflicted by the old gov- 

208 



THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS 209 



ernment, took fire with the idea of self-government, 
and in every corner of Russia are found provinces, 
governments, even cities, repudiating the central gov- 
ernment and setting up republics of their own. Pro- 
visional governments were created last summer in 
provinces of Siberia, in the rich province of Ukrania, 
in the town of Kronstadt, in the Siberian towns of 
Tomsk and Tsaritsine, and in a number of other lo- 
calities. Finland very early started an agitation for 
a separate government, and only the closing of the 
Diet and the prevention by armed force of the con- 
vening of a new Diet stood in the way of a socialist 
manifesto of separation. The Socialists are the ma- 
jority party in the Diet, and they counted on the 
support of enough people in the three "bourgeois" 
parties — the Swedish, old Finnish and young Fin- 
nish parties — to carry their measure through. 

Every one of these attempts at secession was 
marked by riots, murders and excesses of every kind. 
A report from Kirsanoff, a city that wanted last June 
to be a republic all by itself, told of a garrison of 
soldiers who broke loose, fell on the inhabitants of 
the town, robbed and murdered them, outraged 
women, burned houses, looted shops and generally 
behaved like maddened animals. There seemed to 
be no reason why the soldiers, who had previously 
behaved like decent men, should have been seized 
with sudden criminal mania. Liberty simply acted 
on their systems like a deadly drug. 

It was the same thing in Kronstadt, only in Kron- 
stadt they developed a drug habit, so to speak. This 
fortified town of some 60,000 inhabitants is situ- 
ated at the mouth of the Neva on the Gulf of Fin- 



2io INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



land. The fortress of Kronstadt, which dominates 
the town, in normal times constitutes one of the chief 
defenses of Petrograd, a few miles up the river. 
The Gulf of Kronstadt, on which the fortress stands, 
is the chief station of the Baltic fleet. With a strong 
garrison, a fleet of battleships and a well-organized 
Bolsheviki, Kronstadt was able for many weeks to 
defy the Provisional Government, to maintain what 
it called a government of its own, and to commit 
more horrible crimes and more stupid excesses than 
almost any other place in Russia. Murder on a 
wholesale scale marked the progress of the revolu- 
tion in the fortress and on the battleships. More 
than a score of young officers in training were killed 
in the fortress in one day last spring. They were 
not even arrested and tried on any charges. They 
were just butchered. A number of other officers 
were killed, including the commandant and vice-com- 
mandant of the fortress, and other officers were 
thrown into cells and kept there for months with- 
out even the farce of a trial. 

Kronstadt set up a republic in late May and by 
mid- June the orgy was in full swing. The civil pop- 
ulation looted and robbed, and the soldiers and ma- 
rines aided and abetted them heartily. Once a band 
of looters sacking a warehouse were arrested by the 
militia police after a lively shooting match and put 
in jail. Cases where the militia actually arrested 
thieves were so rare in Russia last summer that this 
one received considerable newspaper publicity. The 
papers were obliged to record that, a few hours af- 
ter the men were arrested, a crowd of armed sol- 
diers and sailors demanded the liberation of the 



THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS 211 



prisoners. Of course their demands were honored. 

The provisional government was able to keep 
Finland in partial check by threatening to withhold 
cereals and other provisions from her in case of 
secession. But Kronstadt, being a fortress, had 
plenty of provisions, as plenty goes in Russia these 
days. Kronstadt had more food and fuel than Pet- 
rograd. That is why her orgy was able to last so 
long. It lasted until the days of the July revolution, 
when thousands of loyal troops were recalled from 
the front to restore order, many of the ringleaders 
of the mutinous troops were expelled from the army 
and several regiments were disbanded in disgrace. 
The orgy still goes on to a certain extent in the for- 
tress, and no one knows yet how far disaffection 
among the naval forces went. 

The Kronstadt Soviet, or Council of Workmen's 
and Soldiers' Delegates, covered itself with glory 
during the existence of the republic. The Soviet, or 
one of its committees, undertook the solving of the 
housing problem as follows : The committee went all 
over the town and inspected houses and apartments. 
They inquired in each case at the different places the 
amount of the rent, and then they proceeded to cut 
down the rent, one-third to one-half. They didn't 
say anything about the reduction to the landlord, but 
they passed the word around to the Tavarishi. A 
perfect exodus of renters out of their apartments 
into bigger and better ones ensued. Everybody 
moved, and when rent day came around and the 
landlords or their agents called on the new tenants 
they were calmly told: "Not on your life is my rent 



212 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



thirty rubles a month. It is fifteen rubles, and if 
you don't take that you will get nothing." 

The landlords appealed to the Soviet, but all the 
satisfaction they got there was a threat of confis- 
cation. "You've robbed the working class long 
enough," said the Soviet. "We ought not to pay 
you any rent, and perhaps after a while we won't." 

From one point of view not the least outrage the 
Soviet perpetrated on the helpless population of 
Kronstadt was an attempt to talk it to death. There 
is a fine cathedral in Kronstadt and in front of it, 
as is customary in Russia, a large open square. In 
this square the Soviet erected a speaker's stand and 
every day the population, or as much of it as could 
get into the square, assembled and listened for hours 
to fervid oratory. The people had to come because 
the Soviet ordered them to, and very likely they en- 
joyed themselves at first. Even in Russia, however, 
a continual political meeting, carried on three 
months at a time, every day at 5 p. m., must be a 
trial. 

Tomsk was another city where the right of small 
peoples to govern themselves was demonstrated last 
summer. In the newspapers of June 8, old style, ap- 
peared a telegram from Tomsk to Minister-Presi- 
dent Kerensky, the Minister of Justice and the all- 
Russian Council of Deputies, Workmen and Sol- 
diers, then in session in Petrograd. The telegram 
was sent by the commanding general of loyal regi- 
ments and it read in part thus: "Criminal and mu- 
tinous soldiers in company with other criminal ele- 
ments of the population have organized themselves 
into bands and have set themselves systematically 



THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS 213 



to pillage and assassination. Under the flag of an- 
archy they have looted the banks, the shops, busi- 
ness houses of all kinds. They were prepared to 
murder all heads of public organizations, and de- 
clared that they would next move on to other towns 
and cities and continue their robberies there." 

The telegram went into more particulars of these 
outrages, and closed by saying that martial law had 
been established in Tomsk on the 3d of June, 2,300 
persons had been arrested and the city, thanks to 
the presence there of a few brave and loyal troops, 
was now in order. 

Thus the tale could be continued. Finland, usu- 
ally a peaceful, orderly, law-abiding and intelligent 
country, by far the most enlightened in Russia, lost 
its head completely over the right of small peoples' 
idea. Helsingfors has seen days of violence in the 
old years of rule by fire and sword. But Finland has 
never answered with fire and sword, but by the most 
intelligent kind of passive resistance. With the 
revolution passive resistance became violence. Most 
of this, it is true, came from soldiers and sailors 
of Sveaborg, the island fortress of Helsingfors. 
Murder of officers went on there and in the town 
also. Marines pursued their hapless officers through 
the streets, cutting them down with swords and 
knives, shooting them and killing them by torture be- 
fore the eyes of women and children. The townspeo- 
ple did no such shocking deeds as that, but there were 
bloody strikes and many riots, and finally the at- 
tempt to open an illegal diet and to force a separa- 
tion from the empire. Kerensky handled that sit- 
uation very well, sending the best men in the gov- 



2i 4 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



ernment to Helsingfors, where some kind of a truce, 
temporary no doubt, but a truce, was patched up. 

Kerensky's fiercest battle last summer was with 
Ukrania, where a real government was established. 
It was real enough at all events to force a kind of 
recognition from the central Provisional Govern- 
ment. Ukrania is an enormous territory in the 
south of Russia. It extends into southwestern Si- 
beria and southward to the Black Sea. Odessa is 
its principal port, and within its borders are many 
important cities. Kiev is one of the largest of these. 
About 35,000,000 people inhabit the Ukraine, as 
it is called in Russia. The people are not Russian, 
strictly speaking. They are Slavs, but they have a 
language of their own, a literature, a culture. They 
have been Russian subjects for nearly 300 years. 

The Ukraine is a self-contained country and could 
be made a very rich one. It is rich already in agri- 
cultural resources, the u black earth" of certain re- 
gions producing the most splendid crops of wheat 
and other grains. The fruits of the Ukraine are the 
best in Russia, and the vineyards furnish grapes for 
excellent wines. Russia would be poor indeed 
without this country. 

Last June the Ukranian Rada, or local diet, voted 
to establish a republic, restore the old language and 
customs, and cut themselves off absolutely from the 
Russian empire. They actually created a provi- 
sional government on the spot. Some of the more 
moderate members of the Rada favored remaining 
in the empire as a federated state having complete 
autonomy, and this was finally accepted, I believe, 
by the majority. But immediately the Bolsheviki 



THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS 215 



of the south began to clamor for separation, and the 
Ukranians in the army began to show dangerous 
signs of unrest. A congress of Ukranian armies was 
held in Kiev in the middle of June, in which it was 
decided that the armies of the south and southwest 
ought to be completely and exclusively made up of 
Ukranians. If this had been done the Rada would 
have been in a perfect state to dictate terms of any 
kind to the Russian Provisional Government. 

As it was there was considerable dictating done. 
The military rada, meeting in June in Odessa, served 
notice on the Provisional Government that unless the 
Ukranian soldiers were prevented from forming 
their own regiments no more soldiers of their force 
would be sent to the front. The Ukranian regi- 
ments were formed, some of them in Petrograd, and 
the strains of the national hymn, "Ukrania is not 
dead," were heard on the streets, played by mili- 
tary bands or sung by soldiers, almost as often as 
the classic "Marseillaise." 

Kerensky made a frantic dash to Odessa, to Kiev 
and other cities of the Ukraine. He took with him 
Tereshtshenko, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and one 
or two other ministers, and they met the new provi- 
sional government in parley. The result was that 
Kerensky made a complete surrender, recognized 
the provisional government — at least informally — 
and agreed that the Ukraine should be a separate 
state. There was a perfect tempest of protest when 
the ministers returned to Petrograd. The rest of 
the ministry declared that Kerensky had overstepped 
his authority in committing the entire government to 
a policy which ought to have been left to the constit- 



216 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



uent assembly to decide. They said that his act, en- 
tered into without the knowledge or consent of the 
full government, was illegal. Perhaps it was; but 
it stood, and all the most aggrieved ministers could 
do about it was to resign. 

The greatest task ahead of Russia is federation, 
and she probably will in the end learn how to give 
autonomy to her states and establish a central gov- 
ernment which will bind all the states together in 
happy union. But she has years of strife and monu- 
mental effort ahead of her before the task is done. 
The wisest men in Russia — even Prof. Miliukoff, 
who lived for years in the United States — appear 
to be in a complete fog on the subject of federation. 
Half the wise men want an empire like Great Brit- 
ain or Germany, with practically all the power in 
one central governing body. The other half see 
nothing ahead but dismemberment of the empire. 
Nobody apparently can see Russia as another 
United States. 

I believe that part of our responsibility, after the 
war — perhaps before that time comes — will be to 
teach Russia how to establish a peaceful federation 
on republican lines. Russia perhaps does not need 
to be taught democracy. When she emerges from 
this present anarchy she may be trusted to establish 
a safely democratic civilization. 



CHAPTER XXIII 



WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD? 

Will the German army get to Petrograd and 
Moscow? The answer to this question is, they prob- 
ably can if they want to, but it is hardly possible that 
they do. If they have that object, and if they suc- 
ceed in taking Moscow it will simply add one more 
to the psychological blunders committed by the Ger- 
man government since the war began. The disor- 
ganized Russian army might not pull itself together 
and fight for Petrograd, but the army and the peo- 
ple would fight to the death for Moscow. It is 
their holy city, their crown of glory, their dream. 
Moscow is Russia, and one who has never seen it 
knows not the Russian people. 

Petrograd is a modern European city, built by 
Peter the Great in the early part of the eighteenth 
century and by Catherine II, also called "the 
Great," in the latter half of the same century. Peter, 
who would have been a master man in any century 
and in any country, whether born in a palace or a 
farmhouse, was all the more a marvel because he 
was a Russian, born at a time when the Russian peo- 
ple were still medieval and still oriental. Peter 
didn't allow the fact that he was heir to an oriental 
autocracy to interfere with his ambitions or his activi- 
ties. He left the golden palace in the Kremlin, left 

217 



218 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



Moscow, the capital, and sacred heart of the em- 
pire, left Russia altogether, and went off to be- 
come a day laborer in the shipyards of England and 
Holland. Peter learned what he could in a short 
time and went back to establish western civilization 
in Russia. He chose the site of his new capital much 
as the United States Steel Company chose the site of 
Gary, Ind., for its nearness to a good harbor, its 
easy access to trade routes and its fine front view 
of the best commercial centers. Peter called his 
city u a window toward Europe." 

Petersburg, as it was styled by the half German 
Peter, was a more stupendous piece of engi- 
neering than Gary, Ind., although the steel town is 
one of the greatest triumphs of engineering this 
country can boast. It was built on a marsh 
which nowhere rose above the muddy waters of the 
Neva more than two or three feet, and in most 
places was partially or wholly submerged. That 
marsh never has been completely drained. When, 
in 1765, St. Isaac's Cathedral was built to replace a 
small wooden church of Peter's time, they first had 
to drive over twelve hundred huge piles into the 
soft ground. Of the 40,000 workmen who toiled 
under Peter's direction to create the first Petrograd 
a majority died from exposure and cold, and of 
fevers bred in the miasmas of the bogs. 

Catherine, who became czarina a little more than 
half a century later, vastly improved the city. She 
enlarged it, erecting many splendid palaces and pub- 
lic buildings, and bringing in a vast amount of west- 
ern culture in the way of libraries, art galleries and 
theatres. The monuments of Peter and Catherine 



WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD? 219 



are the most conspicuous objects in the capital. The 
ghosts of Catherine and Peter may be said to walk 
in every street in Petrograd. But the Russians, for 
all their admiration for their greatest monarchs, 
have little real love for the city they built. 

The ghost of Ivan the Terrible walks through the 
streets of Moscow; nevertheless, the Russians love 
the place as the Mohammedans love Mecca. It is 
one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and one 
of the strangest. It has hundreds of churches, so 
gorged with art treasures and with gold, silver and 
jewels that it dizzies the mind to contemplate them. 
It has the ancient wall, foliage-hung, that enclosed 
the Moscow of the thirteenth century, and it has the 
Kremlin, or fortress, which antedates the town. In- 
side the Kremlin is the old palace of the rulers of 
Russia built, in part, centuries before they became 
czars. The first Kremlin palaces were built by the 
dukes of Moscow in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies. 

Some of the most beautiful of the treasure 
churches of the Kremlin were built by Ivan the Ter- 
rible in the sixteenth century. One of these, just 
outside the walls, the Cathedral of St. Basil, is a 
gem of such radiance supreme that the half-mad 
Ivan determined that it should never be surpassed. 
When it was finished he called the architect to him 
and asked him if he thought he could ever design a 
better church. The architect, in the pride and joy of 
his achievement, modestly said that he thought he 
might. "You never will," said the terrible Ivan, 
and he had the man's eyes burned out with red-hot 
irons. 



22o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



In the great square in front of the Kremlin still 
stands the high place of execution where Ivan and 
the other almost as terrible czars tortured and slew 
their victims. In a side street still stands the won- 
derful golden house which was the home and seat of 
the Romanoff boyars, and where the first (or sec- 
ond) czar of Russia was born. Moscow is the very 
symbol of czardom; nevertheless the Russians love 
it as their heart. Germany might send her armies 
there, but they could no more take it, or hold it, than 
they could take and hold Washington. Inside the 
Kremlin walls lie heaped thousands of bronze can- 
nons, bright and beautiful as snakes, all decorated 
with eagles and N's and ambitious mottoes. Napo- 
leon Bonaparte left them there when he fled, de- 
feated and routed by the Russians, only to be still 
more soundly defeated by snow and storm and bitter 
cold. Those cannon are evidence indeed of the in- 
vincibility of Moscow. 

Germany ought to know that a march on Moscow, 
however easy, would result in unifying the Russian 
army against the foe. Perhaps Germany does not 
know this, for she seems not to know anything about 
the hearts and minds of any people. The mechanics 
of nationality she knows and understands. The 
psychology of it she never understands. However, 
I do not believe that Germany's recent attack and 
partial conquest of the islands before Riga are a 
prelude to a march on the capital or on Moscow. 
What Germany probably wants is the splendid loot 
to be found in Courland and Esthonia. Riga, which 
is a city of 400,000 inhabitants, is, next to Petro- 
grad, the most important port on the Baltic Sea. 



WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD? 221 



Out from Riga go immense exports of timber, flax 
and hemp, linseed and many cereals. The country 
east and south of Riga produces these things in great 
quantity, and Germany needs them in her business 
just now, and needs them badly enough to risk a 
few of her ships and men to get them. 

Germany is not after conquest, this trip; she is 
after food and fuel and supplies. A little south of 
Riga lie the Governments of Kovno, Vilna and 
Minsk, and a little south and west lies Russian Po- 
land, already partially in German hands. I traveled 
through part of that country last summer and 
watched through the train windows vast fields of 
rye and wheat, and thousands of acres of potatoes. 
I did not see many sugar-beet fields, but they lie 
somewhere in that region — hundreds of thousands 
of acres of them, already harvested or waiting to 
be harvested. And Germany is hungry for those 
harvests. 

There may be other reasons why Germany is 
pounding so desperately at the defenses of Riga. 
Not very far away, to the north, washed by the same 
Baltic Sea, lies the grand duchy of Finland, the one 
province of the Russian empire which has shown 
friendliness to Germany. Finland is also the one 
province which has already declared its unalterable 
determination not to belong further to the Russian 
empire. Finland wishes to set up a separate gov- 
ernment and to be an independent state. At least 
the mass of the people, expressing themselves 
through a Socialist majority in the local Diet, has 
declared for this policy. 

It would be tremendously to the advantage of 



222 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



Germany to have the big Russian empire split up 
into separate states, and the German government has 
worked assiduously to encourage the Finnish people 
in their secession policy. Finland is such a Mecca 
for German agents, and so many Finns are in the 
pay of these agents, that the provisional government 
last July practically shut the grand duchy off, ma- 
rooned it, so to speak, from the rest of the empire. 
A traveler cannot go to Finland from Russia with- 
out special permission obtained from the war minis- 
try. A resident of Petrograd could not go down to 
one of the numerous and charming Finnish seaside 
towns near the capital, even for a week-end visit, 
without such a permit. I have spent some time in 
Finland and know a great many people in Helsing- 
fors, the capital. I tried to get a permit to stop in 
Helsingfors on my way out of Russia, but the war 
ministry refused to grant the permit. 

When the traveler left Russia for England or 
the United States, for any country, for that matter, 
he had to take a certain train leaving Petrograd at 
7.30 o'clock in the morning, and he left that train 
just once before he reached the frontier. That once 
is at Beli Ostrov, for the customs inspection. After 
that the traveler was a prisoner in his train until he 
reached Tornea, where he was finally inspected and 
convoyed across a narrow stretch of water to Swe- 
den. That was the attitude of the Russian provi- 
sional government toward Finland. 

The grand duchy is rightly considered one of the 
greatest menaces to the future integrity of the em- 
pire. It is rightly considered by Germany a hope 
for the future of Germany, and it may very well 



WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD? 223 



be that the German navy expects and hopes to fol- 
low up the conquest of the Baltic port of Riga with 
a conquest of the Baltic port of Helsingfors. Fin- 
land detests Russia to such an extent that she is ap- 
parently blind to the danger of a friendship with 
Germany. For fifty years she has hated and feared 
Russia, and she apparently cannot get it into her 
head that the thing she hated and feared has gone 
forever. I have observed this state of mind in Poles 
as well as Finns. They have hated Russia so long 
that they cannot stop all at once. The Finns have 
hated Russia so hard that they would not even look 
at the Russian soldiers quartered on them by the 
old government. I spent the winter of 19 13 in Hel- 
singfors, and it was one of the sights of the place to 
me to watch the Finns cut the Russians in the street 
every day. A regiment of Russians marched through 
the streets, bands playing, swords clanking, feet 
tramping, a gorgeous sight. But the soldiers might 
as well have been invisible phantoms for all the no- 
tice taken of them by the Finns. They walked qui- 
etly along, attending to their business, conversing 
or chatting with their neighbors, never looking at 
the Russians. In fact, it was a point of honor with 
the Finns never to look at a Russian. As for speak- 
ing to one, knowing him, inviting him to his house, 
a Finn who did such a thing would have been ostra- 
cized. Even the smallest children knew that. 

This being the state of mind of the Finns, it is 
explainable in a measure why, in order to wring their 
independence from Russia now, they are willing to 
run a very great risk of being absorbed or badly ex- 
ploited by the Germany of after the war. They 



224 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



became part of the Russian empire willingly, hav- 
ing been on very bad terms for a number of years 
with their old over-lord, Sweden. This was in 1801. 
Then the Czar made a solemn compact with Finland, 
both for himself and his heirs, that the country 
should have almost complete autonomy. It was to 
maintain its own army, which would never be called 
upon to serve on Russian soil, but should defend the 
Finnish coast and border in case Russia was in- 
volved in war. 

Finland was to have her own coinage, postal sys- 
tems, schools, courts, language and her own local 
diet. The Czar retained the right of vetoing legis- 
lation, the right to collect foreign customs and other 
imperial rights. Almost every promise made in that 
treaty has been broken by the czars of Russia, es- 
pecially by Nicholas II, now in Siberia. This Nich- 
olas tried to break the treaty altogether, abolish it, 
but the Finns were too intelligent, too clear-headed 
and too united to let him do it. Their resistance 
to his tyrannous treachery is a thrilling story in it- 
self. Finland has never broken any part of her 
treaty with Russia, but now she wants to abolish the 
treaty. The contention is that the treaty was made 
with the czars of Russia, and, now that there are now 
no more czars, the treaty has ceased to hold good. 
Finland is full of German agents, and they must have 
invented this brilliant piece of reasoning and taught 
it to the Finnish Socialists. At all events, they must 
have fostered it with might and main, and perhaps 
the German navy believes that a visit to Helsingfors 
would convert the whole country to it. 

There is even a better reason why the German 



WILL THE GERMANS TAKE PETROGRAD? 225 



navy has been pounding away in the Gulf of Fin- 
land, and why in the spring it will pound again. 
Germany seeks to separate still further Russia and 
her allies. There are only three ways by which 
Russia can communicate with Europe and America. 
One of these ways is across Siberia and the Pacific 
Ocean, a long distance. Another way, through 
Archangel, is a summer way only. The third and 
shortest way is through Finland and Sweden. If 
Germany can partially take Finland and seize the 
railroad which leads to Sweden, and there is only 
one main line of railroad, she can cut Russia off 
from her allies very effectively. Perhaps her next 
step would be to interfere, by means of submarines, 
with Russia's other outlet in the Pacific. 



CHAPTER XXIV 



Russia's greatest needs 

It would be a very terrible thing for democracy 
and the world's peace if the Allies, observing the 
anarchy into which Russia has fallen, should relax 
any of their efforts to help her back to a sound mili- 
tary, economic and social foundation. The first im- 
pulse is to beseech the United States government to 
refuse to loan money to such an unstable govern- 
ment, and even to decline to send Red Cross relief 
to a people who will not try to help themselves. But 
second thought reveals the unwisdom of deserting 
Russia in her crisis, however wilfully the crisis was 
brought on. We must loan money to Russia even 
though we lose the money. We must send her food 
and supplies even though they be received without 
much gratitude. For the sake of democracy, to 
which revivified and regenerated Russia has a world 
to contribute, we must help her now. The task will 
not be as difficult as the surface facts indicate. Rus- 
sia is rapidly approaching the climax of her woe. 

Aside from her military situation, bankruptcy is 
coming if it is not already there. Bankruptcy for 
the national treasury, for few taxes are being paid. 
Bankruptcy for food, clothing, fuel for all the people 
except a few on the farms, and even they will suffer 

226 



RUSSIA'S GREATEST NEEDS 227 



for many things. Hunger and cold are at the door. 
The Russian army may rally, may turn on the Ger- 
mans and magnificently retrieve its lost reputation as 
a fighting force. But there is no way in which the 
army of producers, the farmers and the working 
people, can rout the enemy they have admitted with- 
in the lines. 

The farmer class of Russia this year did not pro- 
duce full crops, and they refused to send to market 
a very large proportion of what they did produce. 
They hoarded their grain for their own use and 
some of it at least they have turned into vodka. In 
the towns and cities of Russia prohibition almost 
prohibits, but the peasant very quickly learned the 
art of illicit distilling, and I heard on authority I 
could scarcely question that stills have been estab- 
lished in half the villages of Russia. The statement 
is borne out to some extent by the fact that drunken- 
ness among soldiers is increasing, especially in places 
remote from the larger cities. In Petrograd I saw 
little drunkenness, but the farther I traveled south- 
ward into the farming area the more I saw and 
heard of it. At the military position in Poland where 
the Botchkareva Battalion of Death was stationed, 
I talked with a soldier who had lived in America. 
In the course of our conversation he mentioned that 
a group in his regiment had got drunk and were in 
trouble. 

"Where could they get liquor?" I asked. 

"Oh, they get it," he replied. "It's new and it's 
quite horrible, but they drink it." 

Serious as the grain shortage was, the transporta- 
tion situation was still more serious. Food for which 



228 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



Petrograd and Moscow would pay almost any 
money, rotted on the ground, spoiled in the half- 
loaded freight cars, and wasted in congested way sta- 
tions for lack of transportation facilities and for 
lack of labor. In the industrial world things were as 
bad. The working people, blind to their own peril, 
had shortened hours of work, had gone slack on 
their jobs, and had voted themselves wages far in 
excess of their productive activities. The conse- 
quences were rapidly accumulating. Factories were 
closing down, partly because they could not get coal 
and partly because of the extortions of labor. Soon 
there will be gaunt famine in the land. The work- 
ing people will know what it is to go hungry with 
their pockets full of money. 

When these troubles culminate — and in a few 
weeks at the most, the world will stand aghast at 
Russia's state — the orgy of the Bolsheviki, the riot 
of the dreamers will end. Human nature is the same 
in Russia as it is elsewhere, the same as it is in New 
York or in Emporia, Kansas. We all know how, 
when hard times pinch the country, the Republican 
party elects its candidates. The people follow their 
theorizing and dreaming leaders in good times, but 
when the hard times come they turn to the party of 
strong business men to set them on their feet again. 
The full dinner pail argument is going to appeal 
strongly to the Russian masses this coming winter, 
and if the constituent assembly is postponed until 
the autumn of 191 8, I am confident that the people 
will vote in favor, not of a socialistic millennium 
that will not work, but for a sane, practical democ- 
racy that will. 



RUSSIA'S GREATEST NEEDS 



What Russia needs above all other things is lead- 
ers. What the people of this country must do for 
Russia is to help her find and develop those leaders. 
They are there somewhere. Russia has shown that 
she can produce great men and great women, people 
whom any nation might be proud to follow. But 
under czardom the only people permitted to lead 
were so corrupt, so reactionary and tyrannical that 
the Russians learned to fear and distrust all leader- 
ship. When they overthrew czardom and banished 
the tyrants and the corruptionists they thought they 
could get along without any leaders. The world 
knows now how fatal was their mistake, and very 
soon the blindest of the blind in Russia will know it. 

Russia needs not only political leaders, she needs, 
even more urgently, leaders in the economic field. 
She needs at the present time a business man of the 
caliber of Mark Hanna, a man who, with a better 
ethical standard, possesses Mark Hanna's great ge- 
nius for organization, his marvelous executive abil- 
ity. Such a man rarely dazzles the public with ora- 
torical powers. He wastes little energy in speech. 
But he knows exactly what to do. He says to one 
man "come" and to another man "go," and you 
may depend on it they are precisely the right men 
at the right jobs. He says to all about him, "Do 
this," and they do it "to the king's taste." Russia 
needs many such men. 

Nobody need be a slave under leaders, responsible 
and removable, like that. We were, in the United 
States, until we got our eyes a little open. We sink 
back once in a while still. Witness some of our 
municipal governments. But freedom under strong 



2 3 o INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

leadership is entirely possible. In fact, it is the only 
real freedom there is in the world. 

The Russians may have a difficult time achieving 
it, for they are not quite the hard-fibered, ambitious, 
struggling race the English, French and Americans 
are. They are fatalistic and dreamy. That is the 
reason they endured their autocrats so long. But 
in the end they will achieve it. 

Russia needs education, and here again America 
must show her the way. A public school system 
on the best lines we have been able to develop will 
make over the Russian people in one generation. 
Ninety per cent, of the present population is said to 
be illiterate. The old government tried within the 
past ten years to extend the common schools, but 
with little effect on illiteracy. The mass of the 
children were given two years of schooling, with 
the object of teaching them at least to read and 
write. Most of them barely learned and practically 
all forgot, because they were not encouraged to use 
their tiny bit of knowledge. Russia has no concep- 
tion of the public library as we have developed it. 
There are libraries, magnificent ones, in the cities. 
But they are reference libraries for the learned, 
not reading and lending libraries for the masses. I 
am sure there is not such a thing in Russia as a 
children's library, much less a librarian especially 
trained and paid to teach children how to use and 
to love books. Russia needs schools to teach chil- 
dren knowledge and she needs libraries very near, 
if not directly attached, to the schools. I talked to 
many people in Russia about the wonderful Gary 
schools, in which children work, study and play their 



RUSSIA'S GREATEST NEEDS 231 



way to fine, strong, thinking manhood and woman- 
hood, and in every case the response was the same. 
"We must have schools like that all over Russia. 
Will you help us, when the time comes, to organize 
them?" 

They cannot hope, of course, to go at once into all 
the intensive work of the Gary public school system, 
but they can adopt its general principles and its du- 
plicate use of the school plant. In this way they 
will be able to educate more children in each school 
house and thus hasten the day when all the children 
will be in school. William Wirt's next great work 
may be organizing school systems in new Russia. 
Having no old system to replace, he will not meet 
with the stupid and criminal obstruction and oppo- 
sition with which his labors in New York were met. 

Russia needs wholesome popular amusements to 
entertain and instruct her adult population. If I 
were to write a detailed list of Russia's most press- 
ing needs I should place near the head of the list 
plumbers and moving pictures. The empire is back 
in the dark ages as far as building sanitation is con- 
cerned. That is no small thing, because it affects 
both the health and the morals of a people. It 
affects their manners also, as any one who ever had 
to enter the lavatory of a Russian railroad carriage 
or station can testify. 

They have some moving picture theaters in Rus- 
sia, but they are poor in performance and frightfully 
high-priced. You pay as much to go to the movies 
in Russia as you pay to hear a high class symphony 
concert. I never saw a 10 and 15 cent motion pic- 
ture house, nor could I learn that they existed any- 



232 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



where in the empire. Mrs. Pankhurst and I went 
to the movies one night, paying something like a 
dollar and a half for our seats. The play was a 
long, dreary drama, ending in suicide and general 
misery. The acting was poor and the actors fat j 
and elderly. For current events pictures they pre- 
sented the Cossack funeral, reeled off at such a dizzy 
pace that it looked less like a funeral than an auto- 
mobile race. 

Moving pictures, carefully selected, offered for a 
small admission fee, would be a boon to Russia. 
They would teach the grown people a thousand and 
one things they have never had a chance to learn, 
and they would perhaps get the Russian mind out 
of its habit of ingrowing, self-torturing analysis that 
leads to nowhere. They would also give the Tava- 
rishi something to do besides soap box spouting, and 
their listeners something more to think about than 
half-baked social theories. Because of the great il- 
literacy of the masses, Russia would have to intro- 
duce into her picture theaters an institution which 
Spain has already established. In Spain few people 
can read the titles and captions that run through 
the picture dramas, so each theater has a public 
reader, a man with a strong voice and clear enun- 
ciation, who reads aloud to the audience, and also 
makes any explanations that are necessary. 

I know exactly where moving pictures for the 
masses could be shown in Petrograd without waiting 
for private enterprise to open theaters. On the west 
bank of the Neva, not far from the sinister fortress 
of Peter and Paul, stands the best and most demo- 
cratic monument to Russian enterprise in the capital. 



RUSSIA'S GREATEST NEEDS 233 

This is known as the Narodny Dom, or People's 
House, a combination club house, restaurant, theater 
and general meeting place of the working classes, 
founded by Prince Alexander of Oldenburg and lib- 
erally supported by the late Czar. 

They have some fine concerts there, in times of 
peace, and an excellent drama for the more intelli- 
gent of the workers. Admission prices are fairly 
low and the performances good. For the less intel- 
lectual there are certain Coney Island features, and 
these are so well patronized that the concessionaries 
were well on the road to vast wealth. Long lines 
of people waited every evening for a turn on the 
chutes or the roller coaster. Their absolute hunger 
for a little amusement, a chance to laugh and be gay 
is pathetic to witness. 

Another thing Russia needs is the soda fountain. 
A cold soft drink in summer and a hot chocolate 
in winter, easily accessible and cheap, would do more 
to take Ivan's mind off moonshining vodka than all 
the laws in the world. Last summer there were 
times when I would cheerfully have given a dollar 
for a frosty glass of soda, any kind, any flavor. And 
there were plenty of others in Petrograd of my mind. 

The best place to have luncheon in Petrograd is 
at the officers' stores in the street which bears the 
appalling name of Bolshaia Konnyushennyaia. Here 
the food, government supplied, is good and it is sold 
for something approaching reasonable prices. The 
best meal I had every day was luncheon at the offi- 
cers' stores. The place is crowded from 1 1 to 4 
every week-day, military men and their families pre- 
dominating. Once, on a hot July day, there ap- 



£34 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



peared on the counter where hors d'oeuvres were 
sold a< cold delicious drink. It was a sort of cherry 
pbosphate, : and there were glass pitchers and pitch- 
ers of it, literally gallons. It sold for about twenty 
cents a small glass, and within half an hour it was 
gone, every drop. The crowd swarmed to that 
counter waving its money in the air, swallowed the 
cherry phosphate in one gulp, so to speak, and clam- 
ored loudly for more. I remember that I pleaded 
almost with tears for a second glass and could not 
get it. There is a fortune waiting for the capitalist 
who will take cold, soft drinks to Russia, and he 
will have besides the fortune the additional satis- 
faction of bringing hope to the sodden victims of 
vodka. 

An army that will obey orders ; a government that 
will govern; leaders in business, in transportation, 
in agriculture and a people willing to obey those 
leaders; education, wholesome life. Russia needs 
all these, and in her coming mighty struggle to 
achieve them the whole world of democracy, and 
especially our United States, must lend willing and 
sympathetic help, and guidance. 



CHAPTER XXV 



WHAT NEXT? 

Man must hope. He must believe that his fight 
is a winning fight or he must give up in despair. 
That is why the Americans place credence in every 
despatch from Russia which seems to indicate that 
the disorganized fighting forces are being whipped 
into form again. That is why any hint that Keren- 
sky had not succeeded in restoring order in the em- 
pire was for some time received with incredulity by 
the reading public. But why refuse to face the facts? 
We must face them some time. 

In late September I read in one of the newspa- 
pers a headline which stated that the so-called dem- 
ocratic congress then in session in Petrograd had 
voted to sustain Kerensky's demand for a coalition 
ministry. The headlines were wrong. What the 
dispatch really stated was that the congress had 
voted not to form any coalition with the bourgeois 
element, or with members of the Constitutional 
Democratic party. That is, the congress would not 
support a ministry that had any non-socialist mem- 
bers in it. "All the power to the Soviets" was re- 
tired as too conservative a slogan. It was "all the 
power to the Bolsheviki" then, for that is precisely 
what the vote in that so-called Democratic Congress 
meant. 



235 



236 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

Since June, 19 17, no fewer than six congresses 
or conventions have been held in Russia with the 
object of finding a way out of the chaos with which 
the country is threatened. Every one of them was 
hailed beforehand as the one which was going to 
be a revelation of the intentions and desires of the 
people. The most important of these was the all- 
Russia congress of Soviets held last July, and before 
that the preliminary convention to prepare for the 
constituent assembly. The one was to decide once 
and for all whether or not the moderate or the ex- 
treme element in the Soviets was to rule, and the 
other was to quiet both elements by showing that the 
government intended to prepare a liberal and a dem- 
ocratic constitution for them to debate, amend and 
adopt when the time came. Lastly, there was the 
great Moscow congress of last August. I don't re- 
member what the stated object of that congress was, 
but it does not matter much. The real object was 
to find out which was the stronger man, Kerensky 
or Korniloff. Kerensky won by a narrow margin, 
a very narrow margin. And then they held another 
convention, and Kerensky lost. 

What will happen next in that distracted country? 
Into what new morass are the people being led? 
Frankly, I do not know. I do not know anybody 
who does. The only analogous situation in modern 
history is that of the Poland of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Poland had a government quite as bad as that 
of the Russian Soviets, or Council of Workmen's 
and Soldiers' Delegates. Instead of being an all- 
socialist affair Poland's parliament was made up en- 
tirely of noblemen. These men were so proud, so 



WHAT NEXT? 



237 



"free" in the New Russia sense of the word that they 
wouldn't yield on any question even to a majority 
vote. A single dissenting voice in their parliament 
was enough to kill any measure. The people of 
Poland had no more to say about government than 
the middle class and the rich have in the Russia of 
to-day. And when a European war on a limited 
scale broke out, and Frederick the Great started the 
era of frightfulness which William the last thought 
he could bring to a triumphant conclusion, the three 
great eastern powers of Europe — Russia, Prussia 
and Austria — sliced up Poland and handed each of 
the three monarchs a piece. Maria Theresa, who 
ruled the Austria of that day, wanted it printed in 
the records that she wept when she took her piece, 
but she took it just the same, and Poland has wept 
ever since. 

This could happen to Russia. She could be dis- 
membered and handed around. But this is not likely 
to happen. The Allies would never be so foolish 
or so cruel as to permit it to happen. Russia could 
fall apart and become an aggregation of small sepa- 
rate states, but each one of those would still have 
its Soviets, and consequently a government without 
stability or permanence. Finland and the Ukraine 
are two Russian states which are trying to bring 
about this end, and they may succeed, but a dis- 
sected Russia would furnish such good material for 
future wars that the Allies can hardly afford to con- 
sent to it. 

Civil war is a fine possibility in Russia just now, 
except that there seems to be no one at hand to or- 
ganize the two forces. The strongest probability is 



238 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



more guerilla warfare, more street fighting, more 
motor trucks loaded with machine guns rushing up 
and down Petrograd, more battle, murder and sud- 
den death, and then the reaction. Just what form 
the reaction will take nobody knows. But the mad 
Bolsheviki know that it is coming, and though they 
almost court it they also fear it. They call this in- 
evitable reaction the counter revolution, and they ex- 
cuse all their vagaries, their obstinacy, their pig- 
headed resistance to a coalition with non-socialists 
on the ground that they are fighting the counter 
revolution. I have heard Americans in Russia, col- 
lege professors, business men, correspondents, even 
members of American commissions, say: "Don't 
blame these people too much for their radicalism. 
They are afraid they will lose all they gained by the 
revolution. They fear the return of autocracy." 

I can say with all confidence that whatever may 
happen in Russia, there is not even the remotest 
chance of any counter revolution, in the sense meant 
by the extremists, nor is there the slightest risk of 
a return of autocracy. The autocracy collapsed like 
a house of cards, and the real surprise there was 
in it for the Duma members who deposed Nicholas 
was that the thing was so easy. I can imagine Mili- 
ukov, Rodzianko and the others getting together af- 
terward and saying: "Why on earth didn't we do 
this in August, 19 14?" 

Nobody wants the Czar back unless it is the Ro- 
manoff family, and doubtless each one of the grand 
dukes believes that if any one came back it ought 
to be himself. The only possibility of a return of 
monarchy in Russia would result from desperation 



WHAT NEXT? 



239 



on the part of the men who will finally restore order 
there. The situation may be so bad, when the time 
comes to do that, that they may decide on a limited 
constitutional monarchy as the best form of govern- 
ment for people who are not yet ready for self-gov- 
ernment. A figurehead king, something visible to 
the people and symbolizing government, but a king 
with responsible ministers who really rule, is a possi- 
bility for Russia. The inevitable reaction, especially 
if it is long postponed, may take that form. I have 
heard many Russians say so. Some said it with 
sorrow, some with satisfaction, but there are plenty 
of educated and liberal-minded people in Russia who 
would welcome it. If it comes, I predict that the 
capital of Russia will be moved back to Moscow. 
The constitutional monarch, if they have one, may 
be that brother of the late Czar who is known in 
Russia as Michael Alexandrovitch, who as one of 
the ablest and most enlightened of the Romanoff 
family. He is the man who was chosen by the first 
provisional government to succeed the Czar when 
the latter was deposed, and the governments which 
have followed have all treated him with rather 
especial consideration. Last June he asked permis- 
sion to leave turbulent Petrograd and spend the sum- 
mer in his villa on one of the Finnish lakes. This 
permission was granted, and Michael has lived in 
Finland in comparative peace and comfort ever since. 
The government has not treated any other Romanoff 
as well. 

Most of the grand dukes and grand duchesses are 
virtually prisoners on their estates. The Empress 
Dowager is confined to her estate in the Crimea, 



240 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 

and the government would not even allow her to 
leave it to bid her exiled son good-by. But Michael 
Alexandrovitch must have convinced the govern- 
ment that he is trustworthy, and he seems to be re- 
garded as a man who could be brought out of his 
shadowy background and set up for the people to 
call a king, if the worst comes to the worst and they 
have to have a king. This is the most severe form 
the reaction could permanently take in Russia, as 
far as I can judge. Of course a military dictator- 
ship may precede this, but the dictatorship would 
be a temporary thing, a war measure to crush the 
Bolsheviki and bring order out of chaos. Nobody 
in Russia, as far as I know and believe, wants a 
counter revolution in the sense suggested by the 
Bolsheviki. But the counter revolution, as a bogie 
to be held over the heads of the timid dreamers and 
of those half-hearted ones who shrink from blood- 
shed, is so useful that the Bolshevik leaders worked 
it hard all summer and in the latest developments 
they were still at it. 

The experience of the French people after their 
revolution is often cited by the timorous in Russia. 
It is true that the Bourbons came back, but the 
people of France did not call them back. They 
were put back by the allied monarchs of Europe, 
aghast at the spread of republicanism in the eastern 
hemisphere. Following the revolution and the two 
score years of Napoleonic wars, these rulers got to- 
gether, signed a secret agreement that the peace of 
Europe depended on France remaining a monarchy, 
and in 1814 they put Louis XVIII on the throne. 
By virtue of giving the French a liberal constitution 



WHAT NEXT? 



241 



he kept the throne until his death, ten years later. 
The allied monarchs saw to it that his brother, 
Charles X, succeeded him, but the allies could not 
prevent the French from turning him out of the 
country within six years. Nor could they stay the 
revolution of 1848 which banished Louis Philippe, 
the last Bourbon. 

Times have changed since the French revolution. 
Kings have lost most of their power and almost all 
of their popularity. They cannot get together and, 
under the direction of a Metternich, agree that the 
peace of Europe demands that Russia remain an 
autocracy. They could not do this even if the old 
combination, Russia, Prussia, Austria, England and 
France, had not been violently disrupted. No coun- 
try in Europe is interested in restoring the Roman- 
off dynasty, unless it be the country of the Hohen- 
zollerns, and that country is not going to have much 
to say about the world's business for the next few 
years. 

There may be no counter-revolution in Russia, 
but there will ultimately be a return to sanity and 
order. There will be a constitutional convention, 
not too soon, it is to be hoped, and in that convention 
the voice of the leaders of the moderate parties will 
be heard. Trotsky may be a delegate, but so will 
Prof. Paul Miliukoff, the leader of the Constitu- 
tional Democrats, or Cadets, as they are colloquially 
known. All through the riot and turmoil of the 
summer Prof. Miliukoff and his colleagues worked 
steadily to keep the party alive, to keep it constantly 
in the foreground as the liberal-conservative force 



242 INSIDE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 



which might at least share in shaping the new consti- 
tution. 

There are plenty of wise, sane statesmen, plenty 
of good citizens in Russia. They are not very con- 
spicuous just now, and for good reason. A fine 
old French abbe who was asked what he did during > 
the Reign of Terror, replied simply, U I lived." 
Avoiding assassination is a career in itself just now 
in Russia. Many of the wealthy classes and the 
estate owners spent the summer in Finland. Some 
went to England or the United States. The peas- 
ants in many parts of the empire, falling in joyfully 
with the Kerensky plan of dividing up the land, be- 
gan the process by sacking and burning the homes 
of the estate owners, destroying their fields, orchards 
and vineyards, and cutting and burning their forests. 
These acts, in conjunction with riots and excesses in 
the towns have encouraged the intellectual classes to 
leave the country and to take no part in politics. 

Despite everything that has happened, despite 
these excesses, there is no question that the Russian 
people in revolt have contributed greatly to the 
world's democracy. They will make still greater 
contributions, I believe. They have a long road to 
travel before they establish their new civilization. 
The Russians are not as developed as the English, 
the French or the Americans. In some respects thev 
are no further developed than the English of the 
reign of Henry the Eighth. They ride in street cars, 
but the street cars were made in Germany. They 
use the telephone, and go up stairs in a lift, but the 
telephone and the lift came from Sweden. They 
have only recently learned to use modern tools with 



WHAT NEXT? 



243 



skill or to farm scientifically. But they are learn- 
ing very fast. They are learning to cooperate in 
their farming faster than almost any other people 
in Europe, which to my mind is the most hopeful 
sign of all. 

For I am just as much of a socialist as when I 
went to Russia in May, 19 17, and just as little of 
an anarchist. I believe that the next economic de- 
velopment will be socialism, that is cooperation, 
common ownership of the principal means of pro- 
duction, and the administration of all departments 
of government for the collective good of all the peo- 
ple. I believe that the world is for the many, not 
the few. But Russia has demonstrated that there 
is no advantage to be gained by taking all power 
out of the hands of one class and placing it in the 
hands of another. Too much power rests now in 
the hands of a small class. But that class never 
abused its power more ruthlessly than the Russian 
Tavarishi did in the 19 17 revolution. 

The lesson of Russia to America is patient, intel- 
ligent, clear-sighted preparation for the next eco- 
nomic development. Beginning with the youngest 
children, we must contrive for all children a system 
of education which will create in the coming genera- 
tion a thinking working class, one which will accept 
responsibility as well as demand power, and into 
whose hands we can safely confide authority and 
destiny. 



Printed in the U. S. J. 



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